Chronic traumatic encephalopathy: contributions from the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Objective: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) is a neurodegenerative disease associated with repetitive brain trauma (RBT). Initially described in boxers, CTE has now been found in other contact sport athletes with a history of RBT. In recent years, there has been tremendous media attention regarding CTE, primarily because of the deaths of high profile American football players who were found to have CTE upon neuropathological examination.

Current understanding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a unique neurodegenerative disease found in individuals with a history of repetitive head impacts. The neuropathology of CTE is increasingly well defined. Prospective, longitudinal studies with post-mortem neuropathologic validation as well as in vivo diagnostic techniques are needed in order to advance the understanding of CTE clinically.

Self-reported concussion history: impact of providing a definition of concussion.

Background: In recent years, the understanding of concussion has evolved in the research and medical communities to include more subtle and transient symptoms. The accepted definition of concussion in these communities has reflected this change. However, it is unclear whether this shift is also reflected in the understanding of the athletic community.

Clinical presentation of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Objective: The goal of this study was to examine the clinical presentation of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in neuropathologically confirmed cases.

Methods: Thirty-six adult male subjects were selected from all cases of neuropathologically confirmed CTE at the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy brain bank. Subjects were all athletes, had no comorbid neurodegenerative or motor neuron disease, and had next-of-kin informants to provide retrospective reports of the subjects' histories and clinical presentations.

Repetition-related reductions in neural activity reveal component processes of mental simulation.

In everyday life, people adaptively prepare for the future by simulating dynamic events about impending interactions with people, objects and locations. Previous research has consistently demonstrated that a distributed network of frontal-parietal-temporal brain regions supports this ubiquitous mental activity. Nonetheless, little is known about the manner in which specific regions of this network contribute to component features of future simulation.

Imagine all the people: how the brain creates and uses personality models to predict behavior.

The behaviors of other people are often central to envisioning the future. The ability to accurately predict the thoughts and actions of others is essential for successful social interactions, with far-reaching consequences. Despite its importance, little is known about how the brain represents people in order to predict behavior.

Interactions between visual attention and episodic retrieval: dissociable contributions of parietal regions during gist-based false recognition.

The interaction between episodic retrieval and visual attention is relatively unexplored. Given that systems mediating attention and episodic memory appear to be segregated, and perhaps even in competition, it is unclear how visual attention is recruited during episodic retrieval. We investigated the recruitment of visual attention during the suppression of gist-based false recognition, the tendency to falsely recognize items that are similar to previously encountered items.

Retrieval Failure Contributes to Gist-Based False Recognition.

People often falsely recognize items that are similar to previously encountered items. This robust memory error is referred to as gist-based false recognition. A widely held view is that this error occurs because the details fade rapidly from our memory.