Demographic profile of surgical approaches to obstructive sleep apnea in the United States from 2004 to 2020: a descriptive study.

Objectives: This study aims to evaluate the quantity, types, and trends of surgical procedures used to treat obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) within a diverse national population, utilizing a comprehensive proprietary healthcare database.

Methods: This descriptive observational study analyzed longitudinal data from the Optum Clinformatics® Data Mart databases, covering the period from January 2004 to December 2020. The study included patients aged 18 to 89 years, both male and female, with a confirmed diagnosis of OSA.

Proactive and reactive processes in the medial frontal cortex: an electrophysiological study.

The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) is known to be involved in adaptive goal-directed behavior, but its specific function is not yet clear. Most theories have proposed that the pMFC monitors performance in a reactive manner only, but it is possible that the pMFC also contributes to performance monitoring in a proactive manner. To date, the evidence for proactive pMFC activity is equivocal.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation of posterior parietal cortex affects decisions of hand choice.

Deciding which hand to use for an action is one of the most frequent decisions people make in everyday behavior. Using a speeded reaching task, we provide evidence that hand choice entails a competitive decision process between simultaneously activated action plans for each hand. We then show that single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to the left posterior parietal cortex biases this competitive process, leading to an increase in ipsilateral, left hand reaches.

The Representation of Action: Insights From Bimanual Coordination.

The motor-program concept, emphasizing how actions are represented in the brain, helped bring the study of motor control into the realm of cognitive psychology. However, interest in representational issues was in limbo for much of the past 30 years, during which time the focus was on biomechanical and abstract accounts of the constraints underlying coordinated movement. We review recent behavioral and neuroscientific evidence that highlights multiple levels of constraints in bimanual coordination, with an emphasis on work demonstrating that a primary source of constraint arises from the manner in which action goals are represented.

Performance monitoring in the anterior cingulate is not all error related: expectancy deviation and the representation of action-outcome associations.

Several converging lines of evidence suggest that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is selectively involved in error detection or evaluation of poor performance. Here we challenge this notion by presenting event-related potential (ERP) evidence that the feedback-elicited error-related negativity, an ERP component attributed to the ACC, can be elicited by positive feedback when a person is expecting negative feedback and vice versa. These results suggest that performance monitoring in the ACC is not limited to error processing.

Energy-minimization bias: compensating for intrinsic influence of energy-minimization mechanisms.

Anecdotal and scientific evidence suggest humans tend to undershoot targets in rapid movements. We investigated whether this undershoot bias derives from energy minimization mechanisms. Participants performed 200 trials of two tasks: (1) a simple slider push to a target, and (2) a modified version of (1), designed so overshooting was less energy consuming than undershooting.

Conscious and effortful or effortless and automatic: a practice/performance paradox in motor learning.

High cognitive effort has been frequently related to better indices of motor learning through the study of many different paradigms. However, automaticity presumably invokes minimal cognitive processing but has often been related to high-level motor performance, which suggests a paradox. The objective of this study was to approach this paradox by examining the viability of the use of different cognitive strategies during practice and performance which promote the benefits of high cognitive effort and automaticity.