Search results for "Meditation"
showing 10 items of 149 documents
The Serenity of the Meditating Mind: A Cross-Cultural Psychometric Study on a Two-Factor Higher Order Structure of Mindfulness, Its Effects, and Mech…
2014
Objective To investigate the psychometric and structural properties of the Five Facets Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) among meditators, to develop a short form, and to examine associations of mindfulness with mental health and the mechanisms of mindfulness. Methods Two independent samples were used, a German (n = 891) and a Spanish (n = 393) meditator sample, practicing various meditation styles. Structural and psychometric properties of the FFMQ were investigated with multigroup confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory structural equation modeling. Associations with mental health and mechanisms of mindfulness were examined with path analysis. Results The derived short form broadly ma…
Collaborative roles of Temporoparietal Junction and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Different Types of Behavioural Flexibility
2017
AbstractBehavioural flexibility is essential for everyday life. This involves shifting attention between different perspectives. Previous studies suggest that flexibility is mainly subserved by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). However, although rarely emphasized, the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is frequently recruited during flexible behaviour. A crucial question is whether TPJ plays a role in different types of flexibility, compared to its limited role in perceptual flexibility. We hypothesized that TPJ activity during diverse flexibility tasks plays a common role in stimulus-driven attention-shifting, thereby contributing to different types of flexibility, and thus the colla…
Cognitive control in auditory working memory is enhanced in musicians
2010
Musical competence may confer cognitive advantages that extend beyond processing of familiar musical sounds. Behavioural evidence indicates a general enhancement of both working memory and attention in musicians. It is possible that musicians, due to their training, are better able to maintain focus on task-relevant stimuli, a skill which is crucial to working memory. We measured the blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) activation signal in musicians and non-musicians during working memory of musical sounds to determine the relation among performance, musical competence and generally enhanced cognition. All participants easily distinguished the stimuli. We tested the hypothesis that mus…
Effects of manganese injected into rat nostrils: implications for in vivo functional study of olfaction using MEMRI.
2011
WOS: 000298212500007; International audience; Manganese-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MEMRI) is a powerful tool for visualizing neuronal pathways and mapping brain activity modulation. A potential drawback of MEMRI lies in the toxic effects of manganese (Mn), which also depend on its administration route. The aim of this study was to analyze the effects of Mn doses injected into the nostrils of rats on both olfactory perception and MRI contrast enhancement. For this purpose, doses in the range 0-8 μmol MnCl(2) were tested. Behavioral items were quantified with and without odor stimulation during the first 2 h following Mn injection. The MRI study was performed after 16 h of intermitt…
Oscillatory brain activity associated with skin conductance responses in the context of risk
2021
Understanding the neural correlates of risk-sensitive skin conductance responses can provide insights into their connection to emotional and cognitive processes. To provide insights into this connection, we studied the cortical correlates of risk-sensitive skin conductance peaks using electroencephalography. Fluctuations in skin conductance responses were elicited while participants played a threat-of-shock card game. Precise temporal information about skin conductance peaks was obtained by applying continuous decomposition analysis on raw electrodermal signals. Shortly preceding skin conductance peaks, we observed a decrease in oscillatory power in the frequency range between 3 and 17 Hz i…
Assessing self-criticism and self-reassurance: Examining psychometric properties and clinical usefulness of the Short-Form of the Forms of Self-Criti…
2021
The Forms of Self-Criticizing/Attacking and Self-Reassuring Scale (FSCRS) was designed to measure self-criticism (SC) through Inadequate Self (IS) and Hated Self (HS) factors, as well as self-reassurance (RS). However, its long and short forms have yet to be validated in the Spanish Population. The present study examines the psychometric properties of the short form (FSCRS-SF) and its clinical usefulness in a sample of 576 adult individuals, 77 with psychiatric disorders and 499 without. Non-clinical participants were split according to their previous experience with meditation (active meditators, n = 133; non-active meditators, n = 41; and non-meditators, n = 325) and differences between t…
The role of left supplementary motor area in grip force scaling
2013
Skilled tool use and object manipulation critically relies on the ability to scale anticipatorily the grip force (GF) in relation to object dynamics. This predictive behaviour entails that the nervous system is able to store, and then select, the appropriate internal representation of common object dynamics, allowing GF to be applied in parallel with the arm motor commands. Although psychophysical studies have provided strong evidence supporting the existence of internal representations of object dynamics, known as "internal models", their neural correlates are still debated. Because functional neuroimaging studies have repeatedly designated the supplementary motor area (SMA) as a possible …
Children with dyslexia lack multiple specializations along the visual word-form (VWF) system.
2009
Developmental dyslexia has been associated with a dysfunction of a brain region in the left inferior occipitotemporal cortex, called the "visual word-form area" (VWFA). In adult normal readers, the VWFA is specialized for print processing and sensitive to the orthographic familiarity of letter strings. However, it is still unclear whether these two levels of occipitotemporal specialization are affected in developmental dyslexia. Specifically, we investigated whether (a) these two levels of specialization are impaired in dyslexic children with only a few years of reading experience and (b) whether this impairment is confined to the left inferior occipitotemporal VWFA, or extends to adjacent …
Rapid changes in brain activity during learning of grapheme-phoneme associations in adults
2020
ABSTRACTLearning to associate written letters with speech sounds is crucial for the initial phase of acquiring reading skills. However, little is known about the cortical reorganization for supporting letter-speech sound learning, particularly the brain dynamics during the learning of grapheme-phoneme associations. In the present study, we trained 30 Finnish participants (mean age: 24.33 years, SD: 3.50 years) to associate novel foreign letters with familiar Finnish speech sounds on two consecutive days (first day ~ 50 minutes; second day ~ 25 minutes), while neural activity was measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Two sets of audiovisual stimuli were used for the training in which …
A potential real-time procedure to evaluate correlation of recordings among single trials (CoRaST) for mismatch negativity (MMN) with Fourier transfo…
2011
Abstract Objective To design a fast algorithm that evaluates the degree of correlation of recordings among single trials (CoRaST) for mismatch negativity (MMN) activity. Methods The participants were 114 children, aged 8–16 years. MMNs were elicited by two deviants in duration that occurred in an uninterrupted sound within a passive oddball paradigm, and each trial lasted 650 ms with 130 samples. CoRaST was derived from the frequency-domain MMN model through Fourier transformation. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the wavelet transformation-based inter-trial coherence (ITC) was taken as a reference. Results Performances of the proposed CoRaST and ITC were similar in eva…