Contemporary Dance Practice Improves Motor Function and Body Representation in Huntington's Disease: A Pilot Study.

Background: Physical exercise improves neurological conditions, but adherence is hard to establish. Dance might be a promising alternative; however, since patients with Huntington's disease (HD) suffer from rhythmic movement execution deficits, any metric dance practice must be avoided.

Objective: Here we asked, if contemporary dance, a lyrical dance form, practiced for two hours per week over five months, might improve motor function, neuropsychiatric variables, cognition and brain volume of HD patients.

Embodied emotion impairment in Huntington's Disease.

Theories of embodied cognition suggest that perceiving an emotion involves somatovisceral and motoric re-experiencing. Here we suggest taking such an embodied stance when looking at emotion processing deficits in patients with Huntington's Disease (HD), a neurodegenerative motor disorder. The literature on these patients' emotion recognition deficit has recently been enriched by some reports of impaired emotion expression.

Viewing another person's body as a target object: a behavioural and PET study of pointing.

Humans usually point at objects to communicate with other persons, although they generally avoid pointing at the other's body. Moreover, patients with heterotopagnosia after left parietal damage cannot point at another person's body parts, although they can point at objects and at their own body parts and although they can grasp the others' body parts. Strikingly, their performance gradually improves for figurative human body targets.

Joint recognition-expression impairment of facial emotions in Huntington's disease despite intact understanding of feelings.

Patients with Huntington's disease (HD), a neurodegenerative disorder that causes major motor impairments, also show cognitive and emotional deficits. While their deficit in recognising emotions has been explored in depth, little is known about their ability to express emotions and understand their feelings. If these faculties were impaired, patients might not only mis-read emotion expressions in others but their own emotions might be mis-interpreted by others as well, or thirdly, they might have difficulties understanding and describing their feelings.

Feeling of presence in Parkinson's disease.

Background: A feeling of presence (FP), that is, the vivid sensation that somebody (distinct from oneself) is present nearby, is commonly reported by patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), but its phenomenology has not been described precisely. The objective of this study was to provide a detailed description of FP in PD and to discuss its possible mechanisms.

Patients And Methods: The authors studied 52 non-demented PD patients reporting FP in the preceding month (38 consecutive outpatients and 14 inpatients).

The impairment of emotion recognition in Huntington's disease extends to positive emotions.

Patients with Huntington's Disease (HD) are impaired in the recognition of emotional signals. However, the nature and extent of the impairment is controversial: it has variously been argued to disproportionately affect disgust (e.g.

Behavioral and neural correlates of communication via pointing.

Communicative pointing is a human specific gesture which allows sharing information about a visual item with another person. It sets up a three-way relationship between a subject who points, an addressee and an object. Yet psychophysical and neuroimaging studies have focused on non-communicative pointing, which implies a two-way relationship between a subject and an object without the involvement of an addressee, and makes such gesture comparable to touching or grasping.

Heterotopagnosia: When I point at parts of your body.

Heterotopagnosia is the acquired inability of brain-lesioned patients to point at someone else's body parts when prompted. The cognitive basis of this disorder is unclear. It might result from a biological function deficit critical for communication in human beings; alternatively, it could result from the disruption of a body representation.

Neural bases of autobiographical support for episodic recollection of faces.

Incidental retrieval of autobiographical knowledge can provide rich contextual support for episodic recollection of a recent event. We examined the neural bases of these two processes by performing fMRI scanning during a recognition memory test for faces that were unfamiliar, famous, or personally known. The presence of pre-experimental knowledge of a face was incidental to the task, but nonetheless resulted in improved performance.

Impaired allocentric spatial memory underlying topographical disorientation.

The cognitive processes supporting spatial navigation are considered in the context of a patient (CF) with possible very early Alzheimer's disease who presents with topographical disorientation. Her verbal memory and her recognition memory for unknown buildings, landmarks and outdoor scenes was intact, although she showed an impairment in face processing. By contrast, her navigational ability, quantitatively assessed within a small virtual reality (VR) town, was significantly impaired.

Geometric determinants of human spatial memory.

Geometric alterations to the boundaries of a virtual environment were used to investigate the representations underlying human spatial memory. Subjects encountered a cue object in a simple rectangular enclosure, with distant landmarks for orientation. After a brief delay, during which they were removed from the arena, subjects were returned to it at a new location and orientation and asked to mark the place where the cue had been.

The hippocampal role in spatial memory and the familiarity--recollection distinction: a case study.

Memory for object locations and for events (comprising the receipt of an object) was tested in a case of developmental amnesia with focal hippocampal damage. Tests used virtual reality environments and forced-choice recognition with foils chosen to equalize the performance of control participants across conditions. Memory for the objects received was unimpaired, but the context of their receipt was forgotten.