Locus coeruleus integrity predicts ease of attaining and maintaining neural states of high attentiveness.

The locus coeruleus (LC), a small subcortical structure in the brainstem, is the brain's principal source of norepinephrine. It plays a primary role in regulating stress, the sleep-wake cycle, and attention, and its degradation is associated with aging and neurodegenerative diseases associated with cognitive deficits (e.g.

The benefits of simultaneous tDCS and working memory training on transfer outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has shown potential as an effective aid to facilitate learning. A popular application of this technology has been in combination with working memory training (WMT) in order to enhance transfer effects to other cognitive measures after training.

Objective: This meta-analytic review aims to synthesize the existing literature on tDCS-enhanced WMT to quantify the extent to which tDCS can improve performance on transfer tasks after training.

N-Back Related ERPs Depend on Stimulus Type, Task Structure, Pre-processing, and Lab Factors.

The N-Back, a common working memory (WM) updating task, is increasingly used in basic and applied psychological research. As such, an increasing number of electroencephalogram (EEG) studies have sought to identify the electrophysiological signatures of N-Back task performance. However, , , pre-processing methods, and differences in the laboratory environment, including the EEG recording setup employed, greatly vary across studies, which in turn may introduce inconsistencies in the obtained results.

Divergent Research Methods Limit Understanding of Working Memory Training.

Working memory training has been a hot topic over the last decade. Although studies show benefits in trained and untrained tasks as a function of training, there is an ongoing debate on the efficacy of working memory training. There have been numerous meta-analyses put forth to the field, some finding overall broad transfer effects while others do not.

Effects of ageing and Alzheimer disease on haemodynamic response function: a challenge for event-related fMRI.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can generate brain images that show neuronal activity due to sensory, cognitive or motor tasks. Haemodynamic response function (HRF) may be considered as a biomarker to discriminate the Alzheimer disease (AD) from healthy ageing. As blood-oxygenation-level-dependent fMRI signal is much weak and noisy, particularly for the elderly subjects, a robust method is necessary for HRF estimation to efficiently differentiate the AD.

Evaluation of Hemodynamic Response Function in Vision and Motor Brain Regions for the Young and Elderly Adults.

Introduction: Prior studies comparing Hemodynamic Response Function (HRF) in the young and elderly adults based on fMRI data have reported inconsistent findings for brain vision and motor regions in healthy aging. It is shown that the averaging method employed in all previous works has caused this inconsistency. The averaging is so sensitive to outliers and noise.