Z Kinder Jugendpsychiatr Psychother
March 2024
Movement as a Neuromodulator: How Physical Activity Influences the Physiology of Adolescent Depression In the context of adolescent depression, physical activity is becoming increasingly recognized for its positive effects on neuropathology. Current scientific findings indicate that physical training affects the biological effects of depression during adolescence. Yet the pathophysiology of adolescent depression is not yet fully understood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizotypy refers to a set of personality traits that bear resemblance, at subclinical level, to psychosis. Despite evidence of similarity at multiple levels of analysis, direct comparisons of schizotypy and clinical psychotic disorders are rare. Therefore, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural correlates and task-based functional connectivity (psychophysiological interactions; PPI) of smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM) in patients with recent onset psychosis (ROP; = 34), participants with high levels of negative (HNS; = 46) or positive (HPS; = 41) schizotypal traits, and low-schizotypy control participants (LS; = 61) using machine-learning.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSmooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM) hold the image of a slowly moving stimulus on the fovea. The neural system underlying SPEM primarily includes visual, parietal, and frontal areas. In the present study, we investigated how these areas are functionally coupled and how these couplings are influenced by target motion frequency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychopharmacology (Berl)
July 2019
Rationale: The non-selective nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) agonist nicotine has been argued to improve attention via enhanced filtering of irrelevant stimuli. Here, we tested this hypothesis in the context of smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEMs), an oculomotor function previously shown to improve with nicotine in some but not all studies.
Objectives: In order to test whether nicotine improves performance particularly when the inhibition of distracting stimuli is required, SPEM was elicited in conditions with or without peripheral distractors.
Eur Neuropsychopharmacol
December 2019
The nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) agonist nicotine and the noradrenaline transporter inhibitor atomoxetine are widely studied substances due to their propensity to alleviate cognitive deficits in psychiatric and neurological patients and their beneficial effects on some aspects of cognitive functions in healthy individuals. However, despite growing evidence of acetylcholine-noradrenaline interactions, there are only very few direct comparisons of the two substances. Here, we investigated the effects of nicotine and atomoxetine on response inhibition in the stop-signal task and we characterised the neural correlates of these effects using blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at 3T.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModel systems of psychosis play an important role in pathophysiology and drug development research. Schizotypal individuals display similar cognitive impairments as schizophrenia patients in several domains. Therefore, schizotypy may be interpreted as a trait model system of psychosis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough research on goal-directed, proactive inhibitory control (IC) and stimulus-driven, reactive IC is growing, no previous study has compared proactive IC in conditions of uncertainty with regard to upcoming inhibition to conditions of certain upcoming IC. Therefore, we investigated effects of certainty and uncertainty on behavior and blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in proactive and reactive IC. In two studies, healthy adults performed saccadic go/no-go and prosaccade/antisaccade tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFModel systems of psychosis, such as schizotypy or sleep deprivation, are valuable in informing our understanding of the etiology of the disorder and aiding the development of new treatments. Schizophrenia patients, high schizotypes, and sleep-deprived subjects are known to share deficits in oculomotor biomarkers. Here, we aimed to further validate the schizotypy and sleep deprivation models and investigated, for the first time, their interactive effects on smooth pursuit eye movements (SPEM), prosaccades, antisaccades, predictive saccades, and measures of psychotomimetic states, anxiety, depression, and stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychopharmacology (Berl)
April 2017
Nicotine is a cholinergic agonist with known pro-cognitive effects in the domains of alerting and orienting attention. However, its effects on attentional top-down functions such as response inhibition and interference control are less well characterised. Here, we investigated the effects of 7 mg transdermal nicotine on performance on a battery of response inhibition and interference control tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Nicotine and methylphenidate are putative cognitive enhancers in healthy and patient populations. Although they stimulate different neurotransmitter systems, they have been shown to enhance performance on overlapping measures of attention. So far, there has been no direct comparison of the effects of these two stimulants on behavioural performance or brain function in healthy humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe antisaccade task is a prominent tool to investigate the response inhibition component of cognitive control. Recent theoretical accounts explain performance in terms of parallel programming of exogenous and endogenous saccades, linked to the horse race metaphor. Previous studies have tested the hypothesis of competing saccade signals at the behavioral level by selectively slowing the programming of endogenous or exogenous processes e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvidence of the genetic correlates of inhibitory control is scant. Two previously studied dopamine-related polymorphisms, COMT rs4680 and the SLC6A3 3' UTR 40-base-pair VNTR (rs28363170), have been associated with response inhibition, however with inconsistent findings. Here, we investigated the influence of these two polymorphisms in a large healthy adult sample (N = 515) on a response inhibition battery including the antisaccade, stop-signal, go/no-go and Stroop tasks as well as a psychometric measure of impulsivity (Barratt Impulsiveness Scale) (Experiment 1).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe pharmacologically challenged catecholamine reuptake, using methylphenidate, to investigate its effects on brain activity during a motor response inhibition task as a function of the 3'-UTR variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) polymorphism of the dopamine transporter (DAT) gene (SLC6A3) and the availability of DATs in the striatum. We measured the cerebral hemodynamic response of 50 healthy males during a Go/No-Go task, a measure of cognitive control, under the influence of 40 mg methylphenidate and placebo using 3T functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects were grouped into 9-repeat (9R) carriers and 10/10 homozygotes on the basis of the SLC6A3 VNTR.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnintentional movement synchronization is often emerging between interacting humans. In the present study, we investigate the extent to which the incongruence of movement trajectories has an influence on unintentional dyadic movement synchronization. During a target-directed tapping task, a participant repetitively moved between two targets in front of another participant who performed the same task in parallel but independently.
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