Unlocking the potential of 'passive' modulation: How sensory stimulation shapes hand and face size.

Knowledge of the body size is intricately tied to multisensory integration processes that rely on the dynamic interplay of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. Recent years have seen the development of passive sensory stimulation protocols aimed at investigating the modulation of various cognitive functions, primarily inducing perceptual learning and behaviour change without the need for extensive training. Given that reductions in sensory input have been associated with alterations in body size perception, it is reasonable to hypothesize that increasing sensory information through passive sensory stimulation could similarly influence the perception of the size of body parts.

Human intraparietal sulcal morphology relates to individual differences in language and memory performance.

The sulco-gyral pattern is a qualitative feature of the cortical anatomy that is determined in utero, stable throughout lifespan and linked to brain function. The intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is a nodal associative brain area, but the relation between its morphology and cognition is largely unknown. By labelling the left and right IPS of 390 healthy participants into two patterns, according to the presence or absence of a sulcus interruption, here we demonstrate a strong association between the morphology of the right IPS and performance on memory and language tasks.

Medial positioning of the hippocampus and hippocampal fissure volume in developmental topographical disorientation.

Developmental topographical disorientation (DTD) refers to the lifelong inability to orient by means of cognitive maps in familiar surroundings despite otherwise well-preserved general cognitive functions, and the absence of any acquired brain injury or neurological condition. While reduced functional connectivity between the hippocampus and other brain regions has been reported in DTD individuals, no structural differences in gray matter tissue for the whole brain neither for the hippocampus were detected. Considering that the human hippocampus is the main structure associated with cognitive map-based navigation, here, we investigated differences in morphological and morphometric hippocampal features between individuals affected by DTD (N = 20) and healthy controls (N = 238).

Dynamic brain states in spatial neglect after stroke.

Previous studies indicated that spatial neglect is characterized by widespread alteration of resting-state functional connectivity and changes in the functional topology of large-scale brain systems. However, whether such network modulations exhibit temporal fluctuations related to spatial neglect is still largely unknown. This study investigated the association between brain states and spatial neglect after the onset of focal brain lesions.

Empowering episodic memory through a model-based egocentric navigational training.

Recent works have proposed that spatial mechanisms in the hippocampal-entorhinal system might have originally developed to represent distances and positions in the physical space and successively evolved to represent experience and memory in the mental space (Bellmund et al. 2018; Bottini and Doeller 2020). Within this phylogenetic continuity hypothesis (Buzsáki and Moser 2013), mechanisms supporting episodic and semantic memory would have evolved from egocentric and allocentric spatial navigation mechanisms, respectively.