Decreased Fronto-Parietal and Increased Default Mode Network Activation is Associated with Subtle Cognitive Deficits in Elderly Controls.

Background: Cognitive functions progressively deteriorate during aging and neurodegenerative diseases. The present study aims at investigating differences in working memory performance as well as functional brain changes during the earliest stages of cognitive decline in health elderly individuals.

Methods: 62 elderly individuals (41 females), including 41 controls (35 females) and 21 middle cognitive impairment subjects (6 females), underwent neuropsychological assessment at baseline and an fMRI examination in a N-back paradigm contrasting 2-back vs.

Aversive stimuli exacerbate defensive motor behaviour in motor conversion disorder.

Conversion disorder or functional neurological symptom disorder (FND) can affect the voluntary motor system, without an organic cause. Functional symptoms are thought to be generated unconsciously, arising from underlying psychological stressors. However, attempts to demonstrate a direct relationship between the limbic system and disrupted motor function in FND are lacking.

Neural underpinnings of background acoustic noise in normal aging and mild cognitive impairment.

Previous contributions in younger cohorts have revealed that reallocation of cerebral resources, a crucial mechanism for working memory (WM), may be disrupted by parallel demands of background acoustic noise suppression. To date, no study has explored the impact of such disruption on brain activation in elderly individuals with or without subtle cognitive deficits. We performed a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study in 23 cases (mean age=75.

Inter-individual variability in metacognitive ability for visuomotor performance and underlying brain structures.

Metacognition refers to the ability to discriminate between one's own correct and incorrect decisions. The neurobiological underpinnings of metacognition have mainly been studied in perceptual decision-making. Here we investigated whether differences in brain structure predict individual variability in metacognitive sensitivity for visuomotor performance.