Search results for "psychological phenomena and processes"
showing 10 items of 710 documents
Neural correlates of hemispheric dominance and ipsilaterality within the vestibularsystem
2007
Earlier functional imaging studies on the processing of vestibular information mainly focused on cortical activations due to stimulation of the horizontal semicircular canals in right-handers. Two factors were found to determine its processing in the temporo-parietal cortex: a dominance of the non-dominant hemisphere and an ipsilaterality of the neural pathways. In an investigation of the role of these factors in the vestibular otoliths, we used vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs) in a fMRI study of monaural saccular-otolith stimulation. Our aim was to (1) analyze the hemispheric dominance for saccular-otolith information in healthy left-handers, (2) determine if there is a predom…
Low-frequency rTMS inhibitory effects in the primary motor cortex: Insights from TMS-evoked potentials
2014
The neuromodulatory effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) have been mostly investigated by peripheral motor-evoked potentials (MEPs). New TMS-compatible EEG systems allow a direct investigation of the stimulation effects through the analysis of TMS-evoked potentials (TEPs).We investigated the effects of 1-Hz rTMS over the primary motor cortex (M1) of 15 healthy volunteers on TEP evoked by single pulse TMS over the same area. A second experiment in which rTMS was delivered over the primary visual cortex (V1) of 15 healthy volunteers was conducted to examine the spatial specificity of the effects. Single-pulse TMS evoked four main components: P30, N45, P60 and N100. M…
The what and how of observational learning
2007
Abstract Neuroimaging evidence increasingly supports the hypothesis that the same neural structures subserve the execution, imagination, and observation of actions. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to investigate the specific roles of cerebellum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in observational learning of a visuomotor task. Subjects observed an actor detecting a hidden sequence in a matrix and then performed the task detecting either the previously observed sequence or a new one. rTMS applied over the cerebellum before the observational training interfered with performance of the new sequence, whereas rTMS applied over the DLPFC interfered with performa…
Facilitation of bottom-up feature detection following rTMS-interference of the right parietal cortex
2010
In visual search tasks the optimal strategy should utilize relevant information ignoring irrelevant one. When the information at the feature and object levels are in conflict, un-necessary processing at higher level of object shape can interfere with detection of lower level orientation feature. We explored the effects of inhibitory trains of transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on the right and left parietal cortex in healthy subjects performing two visual search tasks. One task (Task A) was characterised by an object-to-feature interference. The other task (Task B) was without such interference. We found that rTMS of the right parietal cortex significantly reduced reaction times (RTs)…
Perceptual priming in schizophrenia evaluated by word fragment and word stem completion
2011
Implicit memory seems to be preserved in schizophrenia as a whole, but dissociations between conceptual and perceptual tasks and between accuracy and reaction time measures have appeared. The present research has revealed some methodological limitations in many studies to date that are focused on the study of perceptual implicit memory in schizophrenic patients using accuracy measures. The review of these studies revealed that limitations are related to an inadequate definition of performance and priming measures, a lack of control over the characteristics of the stimuli, and the absence of information on the experimental procedures used in data collection. Moreover, the task used in these …
Altered orientation of spatial attention in depersonalization disorder
2013
Difficulties with concentration are frequent complaints of patients with depersonalization disorder (DPD). Standard neuropsychological tests suggested alterations of the attentional and perceptual systems. To investigate this, the well-validated Spatial Cueing paradigm was used with two different tasks, consisting either in the detection or in the discrimination of visual stimuli. At the start of each trial a cue indicated either the correct (valid) or the incorrect (invalid) position of the upcoming stimulus or was uninformative (neutral). Only under the condition of increased task difficulty (discrimination task) differences between DPD patients and controls were observed. DPD patients sh…
Chronic alcohol intake abolishes the relationship between dopamine synthesis capacity and learning signals in ventral striatum
2014
Drugs of abuse elicit dopamine release in the ventral striatum, possibly biasing dopamine-driven reinforcement learning towards drug-related reward at the expense of non-drug-related reward. Indeed, in alcohol-dependent patients, reactivity in dopaminergic target areas is shifted from non-drug-related stimuli towards drug-related stimuli. Such 'hijacked' dopamine signals may impair flexible learning from non-drug-related rewards, and thus promote craving for the drug of abuse. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure ventral striatal activation by reward prediction errors (RPEs) during a probabilistic reversal learning task in recently detoxified alcohol-dependent pati…
Dopamine-modulated aversive emotion processing fails in alcohol-dependent patients.
2013
Negative mood states after alco- hol detoxifi cation may enhance the relapse risk. As recently shown in healthy volunteers, dopamine storage capacity ( V d ) in the left amy- gdala was positively correlated with functional activation in the left amygdala and anterior cin- gulate cortex (ACC) during an emotional task; high functional connectivity between the amy- gdala and the ACC, a region important for emo- tion regulation, was associated with low trait anxiety. Based on these fi ndings, we now tested whether detoxifi ed alcohol-dependent patients have a disrupted modulation of the anterior cin- gulate cortex activation in response to aversive stimuli by amygdala dopamine. Furthermore, we …
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…