The Role of Sport Psychology in Injury Prevention and Rehabilitation in Junior Athletes.

Sports injuries have historically been addressed and treated from a purely physical perspective. Nevertheless, like in many other aspects of sports, it has become evident during the last decades that psychological considerations and consequent interventions are both vital and inevitable in the work with athletes, particularly in the work with junior athletes. Especially in the domains of sports injury prevention and rehabilitation, psychological measures can yield significant benefits for junior athletes.

Virtual training, real effects: a narrative review on sports performance enhancement through interventions in virtual reality.

The present article reports a narrative review of intervention (i.e., training) studies using Virtual Reality (VR) in sports contexts.

Subjective experience, self-efficacy, and motivation of professional football referees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The present multi-study article investigates the subjective experience of professional football (a.k.a.

Fixation-related fMRI analysis reveals the neural basis of parafoveal processing in self-paced reading of Chinese words.

While parafoveal word processing plays an important role in natural reading, the underlying neural mechanism remains unclear. The present study investigated the neural basis of parafoveal processing during Chinese word reading with the co-registration of eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using fixation-related fMRI analysis. In the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm, preview conditions (words that are identical, orthographically similar, and unrelated to target words), pre-target word frequency and target word frequency were manipulated.

The Functional Neuroanatomy of Reading Intervention.

The present article reviews the literature on the brain mechanisms underlying reading improvements following behavioral intervention for reading disability. This includes evidence of neuroplasticity concerning functional brain activation, brain structure, and brain connectivity related to reading intervention. Consequently, the functional neuroanatomy of reading intervention is compared to the existing literature on neurocognitive models and brain abnormalities associated with reading disability.

The lexical categorization model: A computational model of left ventral occipito-temporal cortex activation in visual word recognition.

To characterize the functional role of the left-ventral occipito-temporal cortex (lvOT) during reading in a quantitatively explicit and testable manner, we propose the lexical categorization model (LCM). The LCM assumes that lvOT optimizes linguistic processing by allowing fast meaning access when words are familiar and filtering out orthographic strings without meaning. The LCM successfully simulates benchmark results from functional brain imaging described in the literature.

Reading intervention and neuroplasticity: A systematic review and meta-analysis of brain changes associated with reading intervention.

Behavioral research supports the efficacy of intervention for reading disability, but the brain mechanisms underlying improvement in reading are not well understood. Here, we review 39 neuroimaging studies of reading intervention to characterize links between reading improvement and changes in the brain. We report evidence of changes in activation, connectivity, and structure within the reading network, and right hemisphere, frontal and sub-cortical regions.

No Fans-No Pressure: Referees in Professional Football During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, European elite football (a.k.a.

Anticipating trajectories of exponential growth.

Humans grossly underestimate exponential growth, but are at the same time overconfident in their (poor) judgement. The so-called 'exponential growth bias' is of new relevance in the context of COVID-19, because it explains why humans have fundamental difficulties to grasp the magnitude of a spreading epidemic. Here, we addressed the question, whether logarithmic scaling and contextual framing of epidemiological data affect the anticipation of exponential growth.

Cloze enough? Hemodynamic effects of predictive processing during natural reading.

Evidence accrues that readers form multiple hypotheses about upcoming words. The present study investigated the hemodynamic effects of predictive processing during natural reading by means of combining fMRI and eye movement recordings. In particular, we investigated the neural and behavioral correlates of precision-weighted prediction errors, which are thought to be indicative of subsequent belief updating.

An orthographic prediction error as the basis for efficient visual word recognition.

Most current models assume that the perceptual and cognitive processes of visual word recognition and reading operate upon neuronally coded domain-general low-level visual representations - typically oriented line representations. We here demonstrate, consistent with neurophysiological theories of Bayesian-like predictive neural computations, that prior visual knowledge of words may be utilized to 'explain away' redundant and highly expected parts of the visual percept. Subsequent processing stages, accordingly, operate upon an optimized representation of the visual input, the orthographic prediction error, highlighting only the visual information relevant for word identification.

The Functional Neuroanatomy of Developmental Dyslexia Across Languages and Writing Systems.

The present article reviews the literature on the functional neuroanatomy of developmental dyslexia across languages and writing systems. This includes comparisons of alphabetic languages differing in orthographic depth as well as comparisons across alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic writing systems. It provides a synthesis of the evidence for both universal and language-specific effects on dyslexic functional brain activation abnormalities during reading and reading-related tasks.

No Effect of cathodal tDCS of the posterior parietal cortex on parafoveal preprocessing of words.

The present study investigated the functional role of the posterior parietal cortex during the processing of parafoveally presented letter strings. To this end, we simultaneously presented two letter strings (word or pseudoword) - one foveally and one parafoveally - and asked the participants to indicate the presence of a word (i.e.

A model-guided dissociation between subcortical and cortical contributions to word recognition.

Neurocognitive studies of visual word recognition have provided information about brain activity correlated with orthographic processing. Some of these studies related the orthographic neighborhood density of letter strings to the amount of hypothetical global lexical activity (GLA) in the brain as simulated by computational models of word recognition. To further investigate this issue, we used GLA of words and nonwords from the multiple read-out model of visual word recognition (MROM) and related this activity to neural correlates of orthographic processing in the brain by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The Functional Neuroanatomy of Letter-Speech Sound Integration and Its Relation to Brain Abnormalities in Developmental Dyslexia.

This mini-review provides a comparison of the brain systems associated with developmental dyslexia and the brain systems associated with letter-speech sound (LSS) integration. First, the findings on the functional neuroanatomy of LSS integration are summarized in order to obtain a comprehensive overview of the brain regions involved in this process. To this end, neurocognitive studies investigating LSS integration in both normal and abnormal reading development are taken into account.

Processing of parafoveally presented words. An fMRI study.

The present fMRI study investigated neural correlates of parafoveal preprocessing during reading and the type of information that is accessible from the upcoming - not yet fixated - word. Participants performed a lexical decision flanker task while the constraints imposed by the first three letters (the initial trigram) of parafoveally presented words were controlled. Behavioral results evidenced that the amount of information extracted from parafoveal stimuli, was affected by the difficulty of the foveal stimulus.

Action video gaming and the brain: fMRI effects without behavioral effects in visual and verbal cognitive tasks.

Introduction: In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we compared task performance together with brain activation in a visuospatial task (VST) and a letter detection task (LDT) between longtime action video gamers (=14) and nongamers (=14) in order to investigate possible effects of gaming on cognitive and brain abilities.

Methods: Based on previous research, we expected advantages in performance for experienced action video gamers accompanied by less activation (due to higher efficiency) as measured by fMRI in the frontoparietal attention network.

Results: Contrary to these expectations, we did not find differences in overall task performance, nor in brain activation during the VST.

Possible roles for fronto-striatal circuits in reading disorder.

Several studies have reported hyperactivation in frontal and striatal regions in individuals with reading disorder (RD) during reading-related tasks. Hyperactivation in these regions is typically interpreted as a form of neural compensation related to articulatory processing. Fronto-striatal hyperactivation in RD could however, also arise from fundamental impairment in reading related processes, such as phonological processing and implicit sequence learning relevant to early language acquisition.

Visual Experience Shapes Orthographic Representations in the Visual Word Form Area.

Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase).

Words in Context: The Effects of Length, Frequency, and Predictability on Brain Responses During Natural Reading.

Word length, frequency, and predictability count among the most influential variables during reading. Their effects are well-documented in eye movement studies, but pertinent evidence from neuroimaging primarily stem from single-word presentations. We investigated the effects of these variables during reading of whole sentences with simultaneous eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fixation-related fMRI).

Oscillatory Brain Dynamics during Sentence Reading: A Fixation-Related Spectral Perturbation Analysis.

The present study investigated oscillatory brain dynamics during self-paced sentence-level processing. Participants read fully correct sentences, sentences containing a semantic violation and "sentences" in which the order of the words was randomized. At the target word level, fixations on semantically unrelated words elicited a lower-beta band (13-18 Hz) desynchronization.

Dyslexic brain activation abnormalities in deep and shallow orthographies: A meta-analysis of 28 functional neuroimaging studies.

We used coordinate-based meta-analysis to objectively quantify commonalities and differences of dyslexic functional brain abnormalities between alphabetic languages differing in orthographic depth. Specifically, we compared foci of under- and overactivation in dyslexic readers relative to nonimpaired readers reported in 14 studies in deep orthographies (DO: English) and in 14 studies in shallow orthographies (SO: Dutch, German, Italian, Swedish). The separate meta-analyses of the two sets of studies showed universal reading-related dyslexic underactivation in the left occipitotemporal cortex (including the visual word form area (VWFA)).

Left ventral occipitotemporal activation during orthographic and semantic processing of auditory words.

The present fMRI study investigated the hypothesis that activation of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) in response to auditory words can be attributed to lexical orthographic rather than lexico-semantic processing. To this end, we presented auditory words in both an orthographic ("three or four letter word?") and a semantic ("living or nonliving?") task. In addition, a auditory control condition presented tones in a pitch evaluation task.

Eyes on words: A fixation-related fMRI study of the left occipito-temporal cortex during self-paced silent reading of words and pseudowords.

The predominant finding of studies assessing the response of the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOT) to familiar words and to unfamiliar, but pronounceable letter strings (pseudowords) is higher activation for pseudowords. One explanation for this finding is that readers automatically generate predictions about a letter string's identity - pseudowords mismatch these predictions and the higher vOT activation is interpreted as reflecting the resultant prediction errors. The majority of studies, however, administered tasks which imposed demands above and beyond the intrinsic requirements of visual word recognition.