Patients recovering from COVID-19 who presented with anosmia during their acute episode have behavioral, functional, and structural brain alterations.

Patients recovering from COVID-19 commonly exhibit cognitive and brain alterations, yet the specific neuropathological mechanisms and risk factors underlying these alterations remain elusive. Given the significant global incidence of COVID-19, identifying factors that can distinguish individuals at risk of developing brain alterations is crucial for prioritizing follow-up care. Here, we report findings from a sample of patients consisting of 73 adults with a mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection without signs of respiratory failure and 27 with infections attributed to other agents and no history of COVID-19.

A healthcare approach to mental integrity.

The current human rights framework can shield people from many of the risks associated with neurotechnological applications. However, it has been argued that we need either to articulate new rights or reconceptualise existing ones in order to prevent some of these risks. In this paper, we would like to address the recent discussion about whether current reconceptualisations of the right to mental integrity identify an ethical dimension that is not covered by existing moral and/or legal rights.

Theta and alpha oscillations may underlie improved attention and working memory in musically trained children.

Introduction: Attention and working memory are key cognitive functions that allow us to select and maintain information in our mind for a short time, being essential for our daily life and, in particular, for learning and academic performance. It has been shown that musical training can improve working memory performance, but it is still unclear if and how the neural mechanisms of working memory and particularly attention are implicated in this process. In this work, we aimed to identify the oscillatory signature of bimodal attention and working memory that contributes to improved working memory in musically trained children.

A multimodal interface for speech perception: the role of the left superior temporal sulcus in social cognition and autism.

Multimodal integration is crucial for human interaction, in particular for social communication, which relies on integrating information from various sensory modalities. Recently a third visual pathway specialized in social perception was proposed, which includes the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) playing a key role in processing socially relevant cues and high-level social perception. Importantly, it has also recently been proposed that the left STS contributes to audiovisual integration of speech processing.

Multimodal imitative learning and synchrony in cetaceans: A model for speech and singing evolution.

Multimodal imitation of actions, gestures and vocal production is a hallmark of the evolution of human communication, as both, vocal learning and visual-gestural imitation, were crucial factors that facilitated the evolution of speech and singing. Comparative evidence has revealed that humans are an odd case in this respect, as the case for multimodal imitation is barely documented in non-human animals. While there is evidence of vocal learning in birds and in mammals like bats, elephants and marine mammals, evidence in both domains, vocal and gestural, exists for two Psittacine birds (budgerigars and grey parrots) and cetaceans only.

Voluntary self-initiation of the stimuli onset improves working memory and accelerates visual and attentional processing.

The ability of an organism to voluntarily control the stimuli onset modulates perceptual and attentional functions. Since stimulus encoding is an essential component of working memory (WM), we conjectured that controlling the initiation of the perceptual process would positively modulate WM. To corroborate this proposition, we tested twenty-five healthy subjects in a modified-Sternberg WM task under three stimuli presentation conditions: an automatic presentation of the stimuli, a self-initiated presentation of the stimuli (through a button press), and a self-initiated presentation with random-delay stimuli onset.

The Armed Conflict and the Impact on Patients With Cancer in Ukraine: Urgent Considerations.

On February 24, 2022, a war began within the Ukrainian borders. At least 3.0 million Ukrainian inhabitants have already fled the country.

Neural responses to sensory novelty with and without conscious access.

Detection of novel stimuli that violate statistical regularities in the sensory scene is of paramount importance for the survival of biological organisms. Event-related potentials, phasic increases in pupil size, and evoked changes in oscillatory power have been proposed as markers of sensory novelty detection. However, how conscious access to novelty modulates these different brain responses is not well understood.

Mutations in trpγ, the homologue of TRPC6 autism candidate gene, causes autism-like behavioral deficits in Drosophila.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired social communication, restricted interests, and repetitive and stereotyped behaviors. The TRPC6 (transient receptor potential channel 6) represents an ASD candidate gene under an oligogenic/multifactorial model based on the initial description and cellular characterization of an individual with ASD bearing a de novo heterozygous mutation disrupting TRPC6, together with the enrichment of disruptive TRPC6 variants in ASD cases as compared to controls. Here, we perform a clinical re-evaluation of the initial non-verbal patient, and also present eight newly reported individuals ascertained for ASD and bearing predicted loss-of-function mutations in TRPC6.

Faces and Voices Processing in Human and Primate Brains: Rhythmic and Multimodal Mechanisms Underlying the Evolution and Development of Speech.

While influential works since the 1970s have widely assumed that imitation is an innate skill in both human and non-human primate neonates, recent empirical studies and meta-analyses have challenged this view, indicating other forms of reward-based learning as relevant factors in the development of social behavior. The visual input translation into matching motor output that underlies imitation abilities instead seems to develop along with social interactions and sensorimotor experience during infancy and childhood. Recently, a new visual stream has been identified in both human and non-human primate brains, updating the dual visual stream model.

Differences in cortical processing of facial emotions in broader autism phenotype.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous condition that affects face perception. Evidence shows that there are differences in face perception associated with the processing of low spatial frequency (LSF) and high spatial frequency (HSF) of visual stimuli between non-symptomatic relatives of individuals with autism (broader autism phenotype, BAP) and typically developing individuals. However, the neural mechanisms involved in these differences are not fully understood.

The Enigmatic Reissner's Fiber and the Origin of Chordates.

Reissner's fiber (RF) is a secreted filament that floats in the neural canal of chordates. Since its discovery in 1860, there has been no agreement on its primary function, and its strong conservation across chordate species has remained a mystery for comparative neuroanatomists. Several findings, including the chemical composition and the phylogenetic history of RF, clinical observations associating RF with the development of the neural canal, and more recent studies suggesting that RF is needed to develop a straight vertebral column, may shed light on the functions of this structure across chordates.

Neural Dynamics of Improved Bimodal Attention and Working Memory in Musically Trained Children.

Attention and working memory (WM) are core components of executive functions, and they can be enhanced by training. One activity that has shown to improve executive functions is musical training, but the brain networks underlying these improvements are not well known. We aimed to identify, using functional MRI (fMRI), these networks in children who regularly learn and play a musical instrument.

Lateral Prefrontal Theta Oscillations Reflect Proactive Cognitive Control Impairment in Males With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neuropsychiatric disorder in which children present prefrontal cortex (PFC) related functions deficit. Proactive cognitive control is a process that anticipates the requirement of cognitive control and crucially depends on the maturity of the PFC. Since this process is important to ADHD symptomatology, we here test the hypothesis that children with ADHD have proactive cognitive control impairments and that these impairments are reflected in the PFC oscillatory activity.

Frontoparietal connectivity correlates with working memory performance in multiple sclerosis.

Working Memory (WM) impairment is the most common cognitive deficit of patients with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). However, evidence of its neurobiological mechanisms is scarce. Here we recorded electroencephalographic activity of twenty patients with relapsing-remitting MS and minimal cognitive deficit, and 20 healthy control (HC) subjects while they solved a WM task.

Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying working memory encoding and retrieval in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.

Working memory (WM) impairments in ADHD have been consistently reported along with deficits in attentional control. Yet, it is not clear which specific WM processes are affected in this condition. A deficient coupling between attention and WM has been reported.

Origin and evolution of human speech: Emergence from a trimodal auditory, visual and vocal network.

In recent years, there have been important additions to the classical model of speech processing as originally depicted by the Broca-Wernicke model consisting of an anterior, productive region and a posterior, perceptive region, both connected via the arcuate fasciculus. The modern view implies a separation into a dorsal and a ventral pathway conveying different kinds of linguistic information, which parallels the organization of the visual system. Furthermore, this organization is highly conserved in evolution and can be seen as the neural scaffolding from which the speech networks originated.

Morphological evolution of the vertebrate forebrain: From mechanical to cellular processes.

Although the cerebral hemispheres are among the defining characters of vertebrates, each vertebrate class is characterized by a different anatomical organization of this structure, which has become highly problematic for comparative neurobiology. In this article, we discuss some mechanisms involved in the generation of this morphological divergence, based on simple spatial constraints for neurogenesis and mechanical forces generated by increasing neuronal numbers during development, and the different cellular strategies used by each group to overcome these limitations. We expect this view to contribute to unify the diverging vertebrate brain morphologies into general, simple mechanisms that help to establish homologies across groups.

A pupil size, eye-tracking and neuropsychological dataset from ADHD children during a cognitive task.

Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed based on observed behavioral outcomes alone. Given that some brain attentional networks involve circuits that control the eye pupil, we monitored pupil size in ADHD- diagnosed children and also in control children during a visuospatial working memory task. We present here the full dataset, consisting of pupil size time series for each trial and subject.

Beta oscillations precede joint attention and correlate with mentalization in typical development and autism.

A precursor of adult social functioning is joint attention (JA), which is the capacity to share attention on an object with another person. JA precedes the development of the capacity to attribute mental states to others (i.e.

Coordinated prefrontal-hippocampal activity and navigation strategy-related prefrontal firing during spatial memory formation.

Learning the location of relevant places in the environment is crucial for survival. Such capacity is supported by a distributed network comprising the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, yet it is not fully understood how these structures cooperate during spatial reference memory formation. Hence, we examined neural activity in the prefrontal-hippocampal circuit in mice during acquisition of spatial reference memory.

A Brain for Speech. Evolutionary Continuity in Primate and Human Auditory-Vocal Processing.

In this review article, I propose a continuous evolution from the auditory-vocal apparatus and its mechanisms of neural control in non-human primates, to the peripheral organs and the neural control of human speech. Although there is an overall conservatism both in peripheral systems and in central neural circuits, a few changes were critical for the expansion of vocal plasticity and the elaboration of proto-speech in early humans. Two of the most relevant changes were the acquisition of direct cortical control of the vocal fold musculature and the consolidation of an auditory-vocal articulatory circuit, encompassing auditory areas in the temporoparietal junction and prefrontal and motor areas in the frontal cortex.