Anticipating social incentives recruits alpha-beta oscillations in the human substantia nigra and invigorates behavior across the life span.

Anticipating social and non-social incentives recruits shared brain structures and promotes behavior. However, little is known about possible age-related behavioral changes, and how the human substantia nigra (SN) signals positive and negative social information. Therefore, we recorded intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) from the SN of Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients (n = 12, intraoperative, OFF medication) in combination with a social incentive delay task including photos of neutral, positive or negative human gestures and mimics as feedback.

Theta oscillations underlie retrieval success effects in the nucleus accumbens and anterior thalamus: Evidence from human intracranial recordings.

Previous imaging studies independently highlighted the role of the anterior thalamus (ANT) and nucleus accumbens (NAcc) in successful memory retrieval. While these findings accord with theoretical models, the precise temporal, oscillatory and network dynamics as well as the interplay between the NAcc and ANT in successfully retrieving information from long-term memory are largely unknown. We addressed this issue by recording intracranial electroencephalography in human epilepsy patients from the NAcc (n = 5) and ANT (n = 4) during an old/new recognition test.

Neural Habituation to Painful Stimuli Is Modulated by Dopamine: Evidence from a Pharmacological fMRI Study.

In constantly changing environments, it is crucial to adaptively respond to threatening events. In particular, painful stimuli are not only processed in terms of their absolute intensity, but also with respect to their context. While contextual pain processing can simply entail the repeated processing of information (i.

Anticipation of electric shocks modulates low beta power and event-related fields during memory encoding.

In humans, the temporal and oscillatory dynamics of pain anticipation and its effects on long-term memory are largely unknown. Here, we investigated this open question by using a previously established behavioral paradigm in combination with magnetoencephalography (MEG). Healthy human subjects encoded a series of scene images, which was combined with cues predicting an aversive electric shock with different probabilities (0.

Electrochemical and mARC-catalyzed enzymatic reduction of para-substituted benzamidoximes: consequences for the prodrug concept "amidoximes instead of amidines".

The mitochondrial amidoxime reducing component (mARC) activates amidoxime prodrugs by reduction to the corresponding amidine drugs. This study analyzes relationships between the chemical structure of the prodrug and its metabolic activation and compares its enzyme-mediated vs. electrochemical reduction.

Pain anticipation recruits the mesolimbic system and differentially modulates subsequent recognition memory.

The ability to encode information into long-term memory is not a passive process but can be influenced by motivational factors. While the mesolimbic system has long been associated with reward-driven memory enhancement, the precise neurobiology of processing aversive events and their effects on declarative learning remain unclear. To address this issue, human subjects encoded a series of scene images, which was combined with cues predicting an aversive electric shock with different probabilities (0.

Dopaminergic stimulation facilitates working memory and differentially affects prefrontal low theta oscillations.

We used electroencephalography (EEG) together with psychopharmacological stimulation to investigate the role of dopamine in neural oscillations during working memory (WM). Following a within-subjects design, healthy humans either received the dopamine precursor L-Dopa (150 mg) or a placebo before they performed a Sternberg WM paradigm. Here, sequences of sample images had to be memorized for a delay of 5 s in three different load conditions (two, four or six items).

White noise improves learning by modulating activity in dopaminergic midbrain regions and right superior temporal sulcus.

In neural systems, information processing can be facilitated by adding an optimal level of white noise. Although this phenomenon, the so-called stochastic resonance, has traditionally been linked with perception, recent evidence indicates that white noise may also exert positive effects on cognitive functions, such as learning and memory. The underlying neural mechanisms, however, remain unclear.

Nucleus accumbens activity dissociates different forms of salience: evidence from human intracranial recordings.

Theoretical models and empirical work indicate a critical role of the NAcc in salience processing. For instance, the NAcc not only responds to appetitive and aversive information, but it also signals novelty, contextual deviance, and action monitoring. However, because most studies have investigated only one specific type of salience independently, it remains unclear how the NAcc concurrently differentiates between different forms of salience.

Study-test congruency affects encoding-related brain activity for some but not all stimulus materials.

Memory improves when encoding and retrieval processes overlap. Here, we investigated how the neural bases of long-term memory encoding vary as a function of the degree to which functional processes engaged at study are engaged again at test. In an incidental learning paradigm, electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of healthy adults while they made size judgments on intermixed series of pictures and words.