Research has shown that focused attention meditation not only improves our cognitive and motivational functioning (e.g., attention, mental health), it influences the way our brain networks [e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere has been considerable interest in empirical research on epistemic emotions, i.e., emotions related to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities such as curiosity, interest, and surprise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCuriosity is often portrayed as a desirable feature of human faculty. However, curiosity may come at a cost that sometimes puts people in harmful situations. Here, using a set of behavioural and neuroimaging experiments with stimuli that strongly trigger curiosity (for example, magic tricks), we examine the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the motivational effect of curiosity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComplex figure copying is a commonly used neuropsychological test. Here we explored the neural basis of the factors underlying complex figure copying (CFC), using data from the Birmingham Cognitive Screen (BCoS) in a large group of sub-acute, ischemic stroke patients (239). We computed two analyses: in the first we assessed the contribution of co-morbid deficits (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There are no currently effective cognitive assessment tools for patients who have suffered stroke in the People's Republic of China. The Birmingham Cognitive Screen (BCoS) has been shown to be a promising tool for revealing patients' poststroke cognitive deficits in specific domains, which facilitates more individually designed rehabilitation in the long run. Hence we examined the reliability and validity of a Cantonese version BCoS in patients with acute ischemic stroke, in Guangzhou.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report a lesion-symptom mapping analysis of visual speech production deficits in a large group (280) of stroke patients at the sub-acute stage (<120 days post-stroke). Performance on object naming was evaluated alongside three other tests of visual speech production, namely sentence production to a picture, sentence reading and nonword reading. A principal component analysis was performed on all these tests' scores and revealed a 'shared' component that loaded across all the visual speech production tasks and a 'unique' component that isolated object naming from the other three tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe contrasted the neuroanatomical substrates of sub-acute and chronic visuospatial deficits associated with different aspects of unilateral neglect using computed tomography scans acquired as part of routine clinical diagnosis. Voxel-wise statistical analyses were conducted on a group of 160 stroke patients scanned at a sub-acute stage. Lesion-deficit relationships were assessed across the whole brain, separately for grey and white matter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe investigated spatial and temporal deficits following brain injury using the temporal order judgement (TOJ) task. Patients judged the order in which two letters appeared to the left and right of fixation. We measured the extent of any spatial bias and the temporal resolution of the decision.
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