Brain and grammar: revealing electrophysiological basic structures with competing statistical models.

Acoustic, lexical, and syntactic information are simultaneously processed in the brain requiring complex strategies to distinguish their electrophysiological activity. Capitalizing on previous works that factor out acoustic information, we could concentrate on the lexical and syntactic contribution to language processing by testing competing statistical models. We exploited electroencephalographic recordings and compared different surprisal models selectively involving lexical information, part of speech, or syntactic structures in various combinations.

Cortico-muscular connectivity is modulated by passive and active Lokomat-assisted Gait.

The effects of robotic-assisted gait (RAG) training, besides conventional therapy, on neuroplasticity mechanisms and cortical integration in locomotion are still uncertain. To advance our knowledge on the matter, we determined the involvement of motor cortical areas in the control of muscle activity in healthy subjects, during RAG with Lokomat, both with maximal guidance force (100 GF-passive RAG) and without guidance force (0 GF-active RAG) as customary in rehabilitation treatments. We applied a novel cortico-muscular connectivity estimation procedure, based on Partial Directed Coherence, to jointly study source localized EEG and EMG activity during rest (standing) and active/passive RAG.

Event-related causality in stereo-EEG discriminates syntactic processing of noun phrases and verb phrases.

Syntax involves complex neurobiological mechanisms, which are difficult to disentangle for multiple reasons. Using a protocol able to separate syntactic information from sound information we investigated the neural causal connections evoked by the processing of homophonous phrases, i.e.

Clinical neuroscience and neurotechnology: An amazing symbiosis.

In the last decades, clinical neuroscience found a novel ally in neurotechnologies, devices able to record and stimulate electrical activity in the nervous system. These technologies improved the ability to diagnose and treat neural disorders. Neurotechnologies are concurrently enabling a deeper understanding of healthy and pathological dynamics of the nervous system through stimulation and recordings during brain implants.

Stimulus evoked causality estimation in stereo-EEG.

Stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) has recently gained importance in analyzing brain functions. Its high temporal resolution and spatial specificity make it a powerful tool to investigate the strength, direction, and spectral content of brain networks interactions, especially when these connections are stimulus-evoked. However, choosing the best approach to evaluate the flow of information is not trivial, due to the lack of validated methods explicitly designed for SEEG.