Genetic variation in the human brain dopamine system influences motor learning and its modulation by L-Dopa.

Dopamine is important to learning and plasticity. Dopaminergic drugs are the focus of many therapies targeting the motor system, where high inter-individual differences in response are common. The current study examined the hypothesis that genetic variation in the dopamine system is associated with significant differences in motor learning, brain plasticity, and the effects of the dopamine precursor L-Dopa.

Effects of age on the neural correlates of familiarity as indexed by ERPs.

ERPs were recorded from samples of young (18-29 years) and older (63-77 years) participants while they performed a modified "remember-know" recognition memory test. ERP correlates of familiarity-driven recognition were obtained by contrasting the waveforms elicited by unrecollected test items accorded "confident old" and "confident new" judgments. Correlates of recollection were identified by contrasting the ERPs elicited by items accorded "remember" and confident old judgments.

The effects of age, memory performance, and callosal integrity on the neural correlates of successful associative encoding.

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated the relationship between the neural correlates of associative memory encoding, callosal integrity, and memory performance in older adults. Thirty-six older and 18 young subjects were scanned while making relational judgments on word pairs. Neural correlates of successful encoding (subsequent memory effects) were identified by contrasting the activity elicited by study pairs that were correctly identified as having been studied together with the activity elicited by pairs wrongly judged to have come from different study trials.

Content dependence of the electrophysiological correlates of recollection.

The neural correlates of episodic retrieval ('recollection') have been shown to differ according to the content of retrieved episodes. It has been hypothesized that these content-dependent differences reflect the 'reinstatement' of encoding-related processes or representations at the time of recollection. It remains unclear, however, whether these effects directly reflect the recollection of differential episodic content, as would be predicted by the reinstatement hypothesis, or whether they are instead associated with processes that are contingent on successful recollection.