Search results for "cortex"
showing 10 items of 1827 documents
COMT genotype predicts BOLD signal and noise characteristics in prefrontal circuits.
2006
Abstract Objective: Prefrontal dopamine (DA) is catabolized by the COMT (catechol- O -methyltransferase) enzyme. Literature suggests that the Val/Met single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the COMT gene predicts executive cognition in humans with Val carriers showing poorer performance due to less available synaptic DA. Recent fMRI studies are thought to agree with these studies having demonstrated prefrontal hyperactivation during n -back and attention-requiring tasks. This was interpreted as “less efficient” processing due to impaired signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of neuronal activity. However, electrophysiological studies of neuronal SNR in primates and humans imply that prefrontal cortex…
Exploring the relationship between semantics and space
2009
The asymmetric distribution of human spatial attention has been repeatedly documented in both patients and healthy controls. Biases in the distribution of attention and/or in the mental representation of space may also affect some aspects of language processing. We investigated whether biases in attention and/or mental representation of space affect semantic representations. In particular, we investigated whether semantic judgments could be modulated by the location in space where the semantic information was presented and the role of the left and right parietal cortices in this task. Healthy subjects were presented with three pictures arranged horizontally (one middle and two outer picture…
Specific modulation of spinal and cortical excitabilities during lengthening and shortening submaximal and maximal contractions in plantar flexor mus…
2014
This study investigated the influence of the torque produced by plantar flexor muscles on cortical and spinal excitability during lengthening and shortening voluntary contractions. To that purpose, modulations of motor-evoked potential (MEP) and Hoffmann (H) reflex were compared in the soleus (SOL) and medial gastrocnemius (MG) during anisometric submaximal and maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) of the plantar flexor muscles. For the submaximal shortening and lengthening contractions, the target torque was set at 50% of their respective MVC force. The results indicate that the amplitudes of both MEP and H-reflex responses, normalized to the maximal M wave, were significantly ( P < 0.05…
Excitability of subcortical motor circuits in Go/noGo and forced choice reaction time tasks
2006
The size of the response to a startling auditory stimulus (SAS) may reflect the excitability of the reticulospinal tract. In this study, we examined whether there was any excitability change in the reticulospinal tract during preparation for execution of two types of choice reaction time task: a forced choice reaction time task (fCRT) and a Go/no-Go task (GnG). In 13 healthy volunteers we used three types of trials: control trials in which subjects were requested to perform ballistic wrist movements during fCRT or GnG tasks; test trials in which a SAS was presented with the visual cue, and baseline trials in which SAS was presented alone. Latency and area of the responses to SAS were measur…
Metabolic and structural connectivity within the default mode network relates to working memory performance in young healthy adults.
2012
Abstract Studies of functional connectivity suggest that the default mode network (DMN) might be relevant for cognitive functions. Here, we examined metabolic and structural connectivity between major DMN nodes, the posterior cingulate (PCC) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), in relation to normal working memory (WM). DMN was captured using independent component analysis of [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) data from 35 young healthy adults (27.1 ± 5.1 years). Metabolic connectivity, a correlation between FDG uptake in PCC and MPFC, was examined in groups of subjects with (relative to median) low (n = 18) and high (n = 17) performance on digit span backward te…
Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex enhances memory-guided responses in a visuospatial working…
2014
Several studies have shown that transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is able to enhance performances on verbal and visual working memory (WM) tasks. Available evidence points to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) as a critical area in visual WM, but to date direct comparisons of the effects obtained by stimulating the left versus the right DLPFC in the same subject are lacking. Our aim was to determine whether tDCS over the right DLPFC can differently affect performance as compared with left DLPFC stimulation. Ten healthy subjects performed a memory-guided visuospatial task in three conditions: baseline, during anodal stimulation applied over the right and during ano…
Revisiting mu suppression in autism spectrum disorder
2014
Two aspects of the EEG literature lead us to revisit mu suppression in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). First and despite the fact that the mu rhythm can be functionally segregated in two discrete sub-bands, 8-10 Hz and 10-12/13 Hz, mu-suppression in ASD has been analyzed as a homogeneous phenomenon covering the 8-13 Hz frequency. Second and although alpha-like activity is usually found across the entire scalp, ASD studies of action observation have focused on the central electrodes (C3/C4). The present study was aimed at testing on the whole brain the hypothesis of a functional dissociation of mu and alpha responses to the observation of human actions in ASD according to bandwidths. Electro…
Patterned functional network disruption in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
2019
Abstract Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease primarily affecting motor function, with additional evidence of extensive nonmotor involvement. Despite increasing recognition of the disease as a multisystem network disorder characterised by impaired connectivity, the precise neuroelectric characteristics of impaired cortical communication remain to be fully elucidated. Here, we characterise changes in functional connectivity using beamformer source analysis on resting‐state electroencephalography recordings from 74 ALS patients and 47 age‐matched healthy controls. Spatiospectral characteristics of network changes in the ALS patient group were quantifi…
Effect of mental fatigue on speed–accuracy trade-off
2015
International audience; The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of mental fatigue on the duration of actual and imagined goal-directed arm movements involving speed-accuracy trade-off. Ten participants performed actual and imagined point-to-point arm movements as accurately and as fast as possible, before and after a 90-min sustained cognitive task inducing mental fatigue, and before and after viewing a neutral control task (documentary movie) that did not induce mental fatigue. Target width and center-to-center target distance were varied, resulting in five different indexes of difficulty. Prior to mental fatigue, actual and imagined movement duration increased with the diffic…
Determining the Corticospinal Responses to Single Bouts of Skill and Strength Training
2019
Mason, J, Frazer, AK, Jaberzadeh, S, Ahtiainen, JP, Avela, J, Rantalainen, T, Leung, M, and Kidgell, DJ. Determining the corticospinal responses to single bouts of skill and strength training. J Strength Cond Res 33(9): 2299-2307, 2019-Neuroplastic changes in the primary motor cortex accompany performance improvements following motor practice. Recent evidence suggests that the corticospinal responses to strength and skill training are similar, following both a single session and repeated bouts of training, promoting discussion that strength training is a form of motor learning. However, these findings are limited by the lack of a light-load strength training group. Therefore, the aim of the…