Search results for "Motor activity"
showing 10 items of 486 documents
Maintaining information in Short-Term Memory between 2 and 6 years old of age : temporal forgetting and helping in maintaining the goal
2014
Working memory is an essential component of thought that is highly involved in learning and academic achievement. However, it is rarely studied in preschoolers, mainly because of a lack of suitable paradigms. Therefore, this thesis investigated the functioning of working memory in children between 2 and 6 years. For this purpose, two original paradigms were used. They were designed to be close to game situations which should help young children to focus their attention on the task. Firstly it was shown that the recall performance decreased over time, even in the absence of an interfering task. Children of this age therefore use a passive maintenance, i.e. without spontaneously implementing …
Early rehabilitation of cancer patients - a randomized controlled intervention study.
2013
Published version of an article in the journal: BMC Cancer. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2407-13-9 Open access Background: Faced with a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, many patients develop stress symptoms, i.e. avoidance behaviour, intrusive thoughts and worry. Stress management interventions have proven to be effective; however, they are mostly performed in group settings and it is commonly breast cancer patients who are studied. We hereby present the design of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an individual stress-management intervention with a stepped-care approach in several cance…
Inactivity-induced oxidative stress: A central role in age-related sarcopenia?
2012
Ageing causes a progressive decline in skeletal muscle mass that may lead to decreased strength and functionality. The term sarcopenia is especially used to characterise this geriatric syndrome. Numerous conditions and behaviours are considered to accelerate the progression of sarcopenia such as chronic diseases, malnutrition and physical inactivity. As people in modern countries are more and more sedentary, the impact of physical inactivity on the prevalence of sarcopenia might be more and more important in the future. In this review, we discuss how reactive oxygen species (ROS) could mediate the effects of lifelong inactivity in the onset and progression of age-related sarcopenia. Althoug…
Analysis of motor control and behavior in multi agent systems by means of artificial neural networks
2004
Abstract This article gives a short introduction to Self-Organizing Maps, a particular form of Artificial Neural Networks and shows by some examples, how these approaches can be used in order to analyze and visualize time series data originating from complex systems. The methods shown in this article have originally been developed for the analysis of RoboCup robot soccer games, a special kind of so-called Multi Agent Systems. Although this application has no direct connection to biomechanics, the examples shown here may give an impression of the abilities of Neural Networks in the field of Time Series Analysis in general. Because of the abstractness of the methods, it appears to be very lik…
Effects of low-gamma tACS on primary motor cortex in implicit motor learning
2019
Abstract In the primary motor cortex (M1), rhythmic activity in the gamma frequency band has been found during movement planning, onset and execution. Although the role of high-gamma oscillatory activity in M1 is well established, the contribution of low-gamma activity is still unexplored. In this study, transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) was used with the aim to specifically modulate low-gamma frequency band in M1, during an implicit motor learning task. A 40 Hz-tACS was applied over the left M1 while participants performed a serial reaction time task (SRTT) using their right hand. The task required the repetitive execution of sequential movements in response to sequences …
The role of synergies within generative models of action execution and recognition: A computational perspective. Comment on "Grasping synergies: A mo…
2015
Controlling the body – given its huge number of degrees of freedom – poses severe computational challenges. Mounting evidence suggests that the brain alleviates this problem by exploiting “synergies”, or patterns of muscle activities (and/or movement dynamics and kinematics) that can be combined to control action, rather than controlling individual muscles of joints [1–10]. D’Ausilio et al. [11] explain how this view of motor organization based on synergies can profoundly change the way we interpret studies of action recognition in humans and monkeys, and in particular the controversy on the “granularity” of the mirror neuron system (MNs): whether it encodes either (lower) kinematic aspects…
Lesions of the dopaminergic innervation of the nucleus accumbens medial shell delay the generation of preference for sucrose, but not of sexual phero…
2011
Male sexual pheromones are rewarding stimuli for female mice, able to induce conditioned place preference. To test whether processing these natural reinforcing stimuli depends on the dopaminergic innervation of the nucleus accumbens, as for other natural rewards, we compare the effects of specific lesions of the dopaminergic innervation of the medial shell of the nucleus accumbens on two different appetitive behaviours, ‘pheromone seeking’ and sucrose preferential intake. Female mice, with no previous experience with either adult male chemical stimuli or with sucrose, received injections of 6-hydroxydopamine (or vehicle) in the medial shell of the accumbens. Then, we analyzed their preferen…
The Effect of Physical Activity and High Body Mass Index on Health-Related Quality of Life in Individuals with Metabolic Syndrome
2020
© 2020 by the authors.
Lack of effects of anabolic-androgenic steroids on locomotor activity in intact male mice.
1999
Anabolic-androgenic steroid abusers have reported hyperactivity euphoria, and decreased fatigue, among other behavioral effects. It has been suggested that the effects of these substances on the central nervous system are similar to those of psychostimulants; however, the influence of steroids on general locomotor activity in laboratory animals is not well understood, especially how noncastrated male rodents are affected. In this study, spontaneous locomotor activity displayed by gonadally intact male mice submitted to several experimental conditions was analyzed. Different housing conditions (individual or cohabiting with a female), diverse steroids (testosterone propionate, nandrolone de…
Erythropoietin mediates tissue protection through an erythropoietin and common beta-subunit heteroreceptor
2004
The cytokine erythropoietin (Epo) is tissue-protective in preclinical models of ischemic, traumatic, toxic, and inflammatory injuries. We have recently characterized Epo derivatives that do not bind to the Epo receptor (EpoR) yet are tissue-protective. For example, carbamylated Epo (CEpo) does not stimulate erythropoiesis, yet it prevents tissue injury in a wide variety ofin vivoandin vitromodels. These observations suggest that another receptor is responsible for the tissue-protective actions of Epo. Notably, prior investigation suggests that EpoR physically interacts with the common β receptor (βcR), the signal-transducing subunit shared by the granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating fa…