The effects of social exclusion on response inhibition in borderline personality disorder and major depression.

It is a prevalent notion that borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by deficits in executive functions (EF) like inhibition. Yet experimental studies yield inconsistent results. However, despite emotional dysregulation being a core feature of BPD, most paradigms did not control for emotional state or comorbid mental disorders.

Altered Visual Adaptation to Body Shape in Eating Disorders: Implications for Body Image Distortion.

Previous research has shown that after adapting to a thin body, healthy participants (HP) perceive pictures of their own bodies as being fatter and vice versa. This aftereffect might contribute to the development of perceptual body image disturbances in eating disorders (ED).In the present study, HP and ED completed a behavioral experiment to rate manipulated pictures of their own bodies after adaptation to thin or fat body pictures.

Gamma-band activity in human prefrontal cortex codes for the number of relevant items maintained in working memory.

Previous studies in electrophysiology have provided consistent evidence for a relationship between neural oscillations in different frequency bands and the maintenance of information in working memory (WM). While the amplitude and cross-frequency coupling of neural oscillations have been shown to be modulated by the number of items retained during WM, interareal phase synchronization has been associated with the integration of distributed activity during WM maintenance. Together, these findings provided important insights into the oscillatory dynamics of cortical networks during WM.

Visual adaptation to thin and fat bodies transfers across identity.

Visual perception is highly variable and can be influenced by the surrounding world. Previous research has revealed that body perception can be biased due to adaptation to thin or fat body shapes. The aim of the present study was to show that adaptation to certain body shapes and the resulting perceptual biases transfer across different identities of adaptation and test stimuli.

Neural adaptation to thin and fat bodies in the fusiform body area and middle occipital gyrus: an fMRI adaptation study.

Visual perception can be strongly biased due to exposure to specific stimuli in the environment, often causing neural adaptation and visual aftereffects. In this study, we investigated whether adaptation to certain body shapes biases the perception of the own body shape. Furthermore, we aimed to evoke neural adaptation to certain body shapes.

Body-shape adaptation cannot be explained by adaptation to narrow and wide rectangles.

Visual adaptation to certain body shapes alters visual perception of subsequently presented pictures of bodies. We investigated whether these effects can be explained by adaptation to low-level visual objects, ie narrow and wide rectangles. Participants (n = 29) adapted to manipulated photographs of their own bodies, depicting them either unrealistically thin or fat.

Orientation-specific aftereffects to mentally generated lines.

After staring at a pattern of tilted lines, subsequent lines appear to be tilted in the opposite direction (direct tilt aftereffect, TAE). In a previous fMRI study we have demonstrated a direct TAE solely induced by the mental imagination accompanied by adaptation of orientation-selective neurons located in the extrastriate cortex, supporting the assumption of a perception-like coding of mental images. In this study we enlarge and specify the evidence for a perception-like coding of orientation-imagination.

Body image distortions in bulimia nervosa: investigating body size overestimation and body size satisfaction by fMRI.

Background: Body image distortion is a key symptom of eating disorders. In behavioral research two components of body image have been defined: attitudes towards the body and body size estimation. Only few fMRI-studies investigated the neural correlates of body image in bulimia; those are constrained by the lack of a direct distinction between these different body image components.

Altered mental number line in amblyopia--reduced pseudoneglect corresponds to a decreased bias in number estimation.

Amblyopic subjects show a wide range of changes within the visual system, starting from deficits in simple perceptual processing up to changes of higher functions of the visual dorsal pathway. Recent studies suggest that subjects with amblyopia also demonstrate alterations in visuo-spatial attention. In contrast to normal sighted subjects, who demonstrate a leftward bias ("pseudoneglect") during physical line-bisection, amblyopic subjects show a rightward bias ("minineglect").

Orientation-specific adaptation to mentally generated lines in human visual cortex.

Previous studies have shown that prolonged inspection of a tilted visual pattern leads to changes in perception ("tilt after-effect", TAE), as well as to a reduction of the neural activation evoked by this pattern ("neural adaptation"). In this fMRI study, we investigated whether such perceptual and neural adaptation can be induced solely by mental imagination. The subjects were asked to mentally generate tilted lines, after which they were presented test lines oriented in the same or the direction orthogonal to the mentally tilted lines.

Content- and task-specific dissociations of frontal activity during maintenance and manipulation in visual working memory.

Working memory, the short-term maintenance and manipulation of information, relies strongly on neural activity in the frontal cortex. Understanding the functional role of this activity is a prerequisite for the understanding of cognitive control mechanisms. Functional imaging studies in human participants have attempted to reveal neural correlates of the subdivision of visual working memory into different processes (maintenance vs manipulation) and according to the type of memorized content.

Separation of the systems for color and spatial manipulation in working memory revealed by a dual-task procedure.

The manipulation of different kinds of content is fundamental to working memory. It has been suggested that the mere maintenance of color and spatial information occurs in parallel, but little is known about whether this holds true for manipulation as well. Using a dual-task delayed-response paradigm that required the manipulation of color and angles, this study finds that the two functions do not interfere.