Sound-encoded faces activate the left fusiform face area in the early blind.

Face perception in humans and nonhuman primates is accomplished by a patchwork of specialized cortical regions. How these regions develop has remained controversial. In sighted individuals, facial information is primarily conveyed via the visual modality.

Feasibility of Online High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) on Psychological Symptoms in Students in Lockdown During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Objective: We aimed to evaluate the feasibility of an online High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) program on clinical psychological symptoms in higher education students in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Materials And Methods: During the lockdown, 30 students aged 18-25 years, who had been screened previously with a cut-off score ≥5 in the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) questionnaire, were randomly assigned to either the 4-week HIIT program with three sessions per week conducted through online videos, or a no-intervention control group. The primary outcome was the feasibility assessment.

Data on the impact of physical exercise treatment on depression and anxiety in a psychiatric hospital for adolescents.

The present data article provides a dataset of psychological scores, additional description of used measures, and descriptive data of participants related to the research article entitled "Impact of physical exercise on depression and anxiety in adolescent inpatients: a randomized controlled trial" (Philippot et al., 2022). This randomized controlled trial aimed at assessing the effect of add-on treatment with structured physical exercise compared to social relaxation activities in a clinical population of adolescents hospitalized for depression and anxiety in a psychiatric hospital.

Impact of physical exercise on depression and anxiety in adolescent inpatients: A randomized controlled trial.

Background: Physical exercise therapy is of proven efficacy in the treatment of adults with depression, but corresponding evidence is lacking in depressed adolescent inpatients. The aim of this study was to document the effect of add-on treatment with structured physical exercise in a clinical population of adolescents hospitalized for depression and anxiety in a psychiatric hospital.

Methods: A group of 52 adolescent inpatients was randomly assigned to a physical exercise or control program three to four times per week over a six-week period (20 hours in total).

Measuring the sensitivity of tactile temporal order judgments in sighted and blind participants using the adaptive psi method.

Spatial locations of somatosensory stimuli are coded according to somatotopic (anatomical distribution of the sensory receptors on the skin surface) and spatiotopic (position of the body parts in external space) reference frames. This was mostly evidenced by means of temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks in which participants discriminate the temporal order of two tactile stimuli, one applied on each hand. Because crossing the hands generates a conflict between anatomical and spatial responses, TOJ performance is decreased in such posture, except for congenitally blind people, suggesting a role of visual experience in somatosensory perception.

Beat Detection Recruits the Visual Cortex in Early Blind Subjects.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, here we monitored the brain activity in 12 early blind subjects and 12 blindfolded control subjects, matched for age, gender and musical experience, during a beat detection task. Subjects were required to discriminate regular ("beat") from irregular ("no beat") rhythmic sequences composed of sounds or vibrotactile stimulations. In both sensory modalities, the brain activity differences between the two groups involved heteromodal brain regions including parietal and frontal cortical areas and occipital brain areas, that were recruited in the early blind group only.

Motor Skill Training May Restore Impaired Corticospinal Tract Fibers in Children With Cerebral Palsy.

. In children with unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP), the fibers of the corticospinal tract (CST) emerging from the lesioned hemisphere are damaged following the initial brain injury. The extent to which the integrity of these fibers is restorable with training is unknown.

Neuropsychological profiles of children with vestibular loss.

Background: The impact of vestibular loss (VL) on cognition has been previously studied in experimental animal, human and adult patient studies showing links between VL, and cognitive impairments in space orientation, working memory, mental rotation and selective attention. However, few studies have been conducted on children with VL.

Objective: We investigated for the first time, the impact of a VL on children's cognition.

Testing the exteroceptive function of nociception: The role of visual experience in shaping the spatial representations of nociceptive inputs.

Adequately localizing pain is crucial to protect the body against physical damage and react to the stimulus in external space having caused such damage. Accordingly, it is hypothesized that nociceptive inputs are remapped from a somatotopic reference frame, representing the skin surface, towards a spatiotopic frame, representing the body parts in external space. This ability is thought to be developed and shaped by early visual experience.

The influence of visual experience and cognitive goals on the spatial representations of nociceptive stimuli.

Localizing pain is crucial because it allows for detecting which part of the body is being hurt and identifying in its surrounding which stimulus is producing the damage. Nociceptive inputs should therefore be mapped according to somatotopic ("which limb is stimulated?") and spatiotopic representations ("where is the stimulated limb?"). Because the body posture constantly changes, the brain has to realign the different spatial representations, for instance when the arms are crossed with the left hand in the right space and vice versa, to adequately guide actions towards the threatening object.

Impact of Physical Exercise on Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety in Pre-adolescents: A Pilot Randomized Trial.

Aim: The intensity of the most appropriate exercise to use in depressed youth is unclear due to differences in methodology and the lack of evidence documenting the effect of physical activity in children. Therefore, the authors of this study attempted to document the effectiveness of different training intensities to reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety in pre-teens.

Methods: The study included twenty-seven, randomly selected pre-adolescents (aged between 9-11 years of age) all of whom had Primary education.

A key role of the prefrontal cortex in the maintenance of chronic tinnitus: An fMRI study using a Stroop task.

Introduction: Since we recently showed in behavioural tasks that the top-down cognitive control was specifically altered in tinnitus sufferers, here we wanted to establish the link between this impaired executive function and brain alterations in the frontal cortex in tinnitus patients.

Method: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we monitored the brain activity changes in sixteen tinnitus patients (TP) and their control subjects (CS) while they were performing a spatial Stroop task, both in audition and vision.

Results: We observed that TP differed from CS in their functional recruitment of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC, BA46), the cingulate gyrus and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, BA10).

Cortical Plasticity and Olfactory Function in Early Blindness.

Over the last decade, functional brain imaging has provided insight to the maturation processes and has helped elucidate the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in brain plasticity in the absence of vision. In case of congenital blindness, drastic changes occur within the deafferented "visual" cortex that starts receiving and processing non visual inputs, including olfactory stimuli. This functional reorganization of the occipital cortex gives rise to compensatory perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that help blind persons achieve perceptual tasks, leading to superior olfactory abilities in these subjects.

Hearing, feeling or seeing a beat recruits a supramodal network in the auditory dorsal stream.

Hearing a beat recruits a wide neural network that involves the auditory cortex and motor planning regions. Perceiving a beat can potentially be achieved via vision or even touch, but it is currently not clear whether a common neural network underlies beat processing. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test to what extent the neural network involved in beat processing is supramodal, that is, is the same in the different sensory modalities.

Altered inhibitory control and increased sensitivity to cross-modal interference in tinnitus during auditory and visual tasks.

Tinnitus is the perception of sound in the absence of external stimulus. Currently, the pathophysiology of tinnitus is not fully understood, but recent studies indicate that alterations in the brain involve non-auditory areas, including the prefrontal cortex. In experiment 1, we used a go/no-go paradigm to evaluate the target detection speed and the inhibitory control in tinnitus participants (TP) and control subjects (CS), both in unimodal and bimodal conditions in the auditory and visual modalities.

Improved beat asynchrony detection in early blind individuals.

Although early blind (EB) individuals are thought to have a better musical sense than sighted subjects, no study has investigated the musical rhythm and beat processing abilities in EB individuals. Using an adaptive 'up and down' procedure, we measured the beat asynchrony detection threshold and the duration discrimination threshold, in the auditory and vibrotactile modalities in both EB and sighted control (SC) subjects matched for age, gender, and musical experience. We observed that EB subjects were better than SC in the beat asynchrony detection task; that is, they showed lower thresholds than SC, both in the auditory and in the vibrotactile modalities.

Altered top-down cognitive control and auditory processing in tinnitus: evidences from auditory and visual spatial stroop.

Purpose: Tinnitus is the perception of a sound in the absence of external stimulus. Currently, the pathophysiology of tinnitus is not fully understood, but recent studies indicate that alterations in the brain involve non-auditory areas, including the prefrontal cortex. Here, we hypothesize that these brain alterations affect top-down cognitive control mechanisms that play a role in the regulation of sensations, emotions and attention resources.

Tinnitus specifically alters the top-down executive control sub-component of attention: evidence from the Attention Network Task.

Tinnitus can be defined as the perception of noxious disabling internal sounds in the absence of external stimulation. While most individuals with tinnitus show some habituation to these internal sounds, many of them experience significant daily life impairments. There is now convincing evidence that impairment in attentional processes may be involved in tinnitus, particularly by hampering the habituation mechanism related to the prefrontal cortex activity.

Relationship Between Cortical Thickness and Functional Activation in the Early Blind.

Early blindness results in both structural and functional changes of the brain. However, these changes have rarely been studied in relation to each other. We measured alterations in cortical thickness (CT) caused by early visual deprivation and their relationship with cortical activity.

Neural correlates of the numerical distance effect in children.

In number comparison tasks, the performance is better when the distance between the numbers to compare increases. It has been shown that this so-called numerical distance effect (NDE) decreases with age but the neuroanatomical correlates of these age-related changes are poorly known. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we recorded the brain activity changes in children aged from 8 to 14 years while they performed a number comparison task on pairs of Arabic digits and a control color comparison task on non-numerical symbols.

Right occipital cortex activation correlates with superior odor processing performance in the early blind.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in ten early blind humans, we found robust occipital activation during two odor-processing tasks (discrimination or categorization of fruit and flower odors), as well as during control auditory-verbal conditions (discrimination or categorization of fruit and flower names). We also found evidence for reorganization and specialization of the ventral part of the occipital cortex, with dissociation according to stimulus modality: the right fusiform gyrus was most activated during olfactory conditions while part of the left ventral lateral occipital complex showed a preference for auditory-verbal processing. Only little occipital activation was found in sighted subjects, but the same right-olfactory/left-auditory-verbal hemispheric lateralization was found overall in their brain.

Cortical plasticity and preserved function in early blindness.

The "neural Darwinism" theory predicts that when one sensory modality is lacking, as in congenital blindness, the target structures are taken over by the afferent inputs from other senses that will promote and control their functional maturation (Edelman, 1993). This view receives support from both cross-modal plasticity experiments in animal models and functional imaging studies in man, which are presented here.

Language impairment associated with arachnoid cysts: recovery after surgical treatment.

Supporting data from the literature, we observe that large arachnoid cysts may affect cognitive function. Neuropsychologic assessment plus magnetic resonance imaging allowed for documentation of associations between left temporal arachnoid cysts, language impairment, and other cognitive dysfunctions. Significant cognitive improvements were evident soon after cysto-peritoneal shunting.

Development of a fully automated system for delivering odors in an MRI environment.

We describe the development and evaluation of a computer-controlled system for delivering odors in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) environment. The system allows a timely presentation of different odors in synchrony with MRI sequences and participant's inspiration phase. The rise/fall time of odor deliverance has been optimized to generate prompt and strong stimulations.

Preserved functional specialization for spatial processing in the middle occipital gyrus of the early blind.

The occipital cortex (OC) of early-blind humans is activated during various nonvisual perceptual and cognitive tasks, but little is known about its modular organization. Using functional MRI we tested whether processing of auditory versus tactile and spatial versus nonspatial information was dissociated in the OC of the early blind. No modality-specific OC activation was observed.