Search results for "NEUROSCIENCE"
showing 10 items of 8040 documents
Motor Transitions' Peculiarity of Heterozygous DAT Rats When Offspring of an Unconventional KOxWT Mating.
2020
Abstract Causal factors of psychiatric diseases are unclear, due to gene × environment interactions. Evaluation of consequences, after a dopamine-transporter (DAT) gene knock-out (DAT-KO), has enhanced our understanding into the pathological dynamics of several brain disorders, such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity and Bipolar-Affective disorders. Recently, our attention has shifted to DAT hypo-functional (heterozygous, HET) rodents: HET dams display less maternal care and HET females display marked hypo-locomotion if cared by HET dams (Mariano et al., 2019). We assessed phenotypes of male DAT-heterozygous rats as a function of their parents: we compared “maternal” origin (MAT-HET, obtain…
Postural and gestural synchronization, sequential imitation, and mirroring predict perceived coupling of dancing dyads
2023
Body movement is a primary nonverbal communication channel in humans. Coordinated social behaviors, such as dancing together, encourage multifarious rhythmic and interpersonally coupled movements from which observers can extract socially and contextually relevant information. The investigation of relations between visual social perception and kinematic motor coupling is important for social cognition. Perceived coupling of dyads spontaneously dancing to pop music has been shown to be highly driven by the degree of frontal orientation between dancers. The perceptual salience of other aspects, including postural congruence, movement frequencies, time-delayed relations, and horizontal mirrorin…
Seeing Gravity: Gait Adaptations to Visual and Physical Inclines – A Virtual Reality Study
2020
Using advanced virtual reality technology, we demonstrate that exposure to virtual inclinations visually simulating inclined walking induces gait modulations in a manner consistent with expected gravitational forces (i.e., acting upon a free body), suggesting vision-based perception of gravity. The force of gravity critically impacts the regulation of our movements. However, how humans perceive and incorporate gravity into locomotion is not well understood. In this study, we introduce a novel paradigm for exposing humans to incongruent sensory information under conditions constrained by distinct gravitational effects, facilitating analysis of the consistency of human locomotion with expecte…
A Phenomenological Framework for Neuroscience?
2006
I try to sketch what a phenomenological constraint for the Neuroscience would be consisting of. I maintain that an adequate phenomenology is a condition for the Neurosciences to account for our every-day experience of the world in its broadest sense. As a guideline for it, I assume the phenomenological description of our actual experience of things, others, meanings and values provided by the Gestaltpsychology tradition. In order to prove its usefulness, I discuss the explanatory gap Cognitive Sciences are actually facing to. Then I propose some arguments drawn by Köhler's dynamical theory, to show what a solution of the explanatory gap might look like, and how the phenomenological and neur…
Environmental Enrichment During Adolescence Mitigates Cognitive Deficits and Alcohol Vulnerability due to Continuous and Intermittent Perinatal Alcoh…
2020
Perinatal alcohol exposure affects ontogenic neurodevelopment, causing physical and functional long-term abnormalities with limited treatment options. This study investigated long-term consequences of continuous and intermittent maternal alcohol drinking on behavioral readouts of cognitive function and alcohol vulnerability in the offspring. The effects of environmental enrichment (EE) during adolescence were also evaluated. Female rats underwent continuous alcohol drinking (CAD)—or intermittent alcohol drinking paradigm (IAD), along pregestation, gestation, and lactation periods—equivalent to the whole gestational period in humans. Male offspring were reared in standard conditions or EE un…
Can Oscillatory Alpha-Gamma Phase-Amplitude Coupling be Used to Understand and Enhance TMS Effects?
2019
Recent applications of simultaneous scalp electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) suggest that adapting stimulation to underlying brain states may enhance neuroplastic effects of TMS. It is often assumed that longer-lasting effects of TMS on brain function may be mediated by phasic interactions between TMS pulses and endogenous cortical oscillatory dynamics. The mechanisms by which TMS exerts its neuromodulatory effects, however, remain unknown. Here, we discuss evidence concerning the functional effects on synaptic plasticity of oscillatory cross-frequency coupling in cortical networks as a potential framework for understanding the neuromodulatory effects o…
Neural phoneme discrimination in variable speech in newborns – associations with dyslexia risk and later language skills
2023
AbstractA crucial skill in infant language acquisition is learning of the native language phonemes. This requires the ability to group complex sounds into distinct auditory categories based on their shared features. Problems in phonetic learning have been suggested to underlie language learning difficulties in dyslexia, a developmental reading-skill deficit. We investigated auditory abilities important for language acquisition in newborns with or without a familial risk for dyslexia with electrophysiological mismatch responses (MMRs). We presented vowel changes in a sequence of acoustically varying vowels, requiring grouping of the stimuli to two phoneme categories. The vowel changes elicit…
Red Light Optogenetics in Neuroscience
2022
Optogenetics, a field concentrating on controlling cellular functions by means of light-activated proteins, has shown tremendous potential in neuroscience. It possesses superior spatiotemporal resolution compared to the surgical, electrical, and pharmacological methods traditionally used in studying brain function. A multitude of optogenetic tools for neuroscience have been created that, for example, enable the control of action potential generation via light-activated ion channels. Other optogenetic proteins have been used in the brain, for example, to control long-term potentiation or to ablate specific subtypes of neurons. In in vivo applications, however, the majority of optogenetic too…
Slight variations in components ratio affect odor pleasantness of a blending mixture
2009
International audience; Odors rely mainly on the perception of odorants mixtures but are commonly perceived as single undivided entities; nevertheless, the processes involved remain poorly explored. It has been reported that perceptual blending, based on configural olfactory processing, can lead odorant mixtures to give rise to an emergent odor quality not present in the components. Furthermore, very slight variations (just noticeable differences, jnd) in components concentrations were shown to be sufficient to modify the odor quality of a blending mixture. In the present study, we set out to examine whether jnd in components concentrations could also affect the odor pleasantness of a blend…
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Trains at 1 Hz Frequency of the Right Posterior Parietal Cortex Facilitate Recognition Memory
2021
Neuroimaging, neuropsychological, and brain stimulation studies have led to contrasting findings regarding the potential roles of the lateral parietal lobe in episodic memory. Studies using brain stimulation methods reported in the literature do not offer unequivocal findings on the interactions with stimulation location (left vs. right hemisphere) or timing of the stimulation (encoding vs. retrieval). To address these issues, active and sham 1 Hz repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) trains of 600 stimuli were applied over the right or left posterior parietal cortex (PPC) before the encoding or before the retrieval phase of a recognition memory task of unknown faces in a grou…