Repetitive T1 Imaging Influences Gray Matter Volume Estimations in Structural Brain Imaging.

Voxel-based morphometry (VBM) is a widely used tool for studying structural patterns of brain plasticity, brain development and disease. The source of the T-signal changes is not understood. Most of these changes are discussed to represent loss or possibly gain of brain gray matter and recent publications speculate also about non-structural changes affecting T-signal.

The migraineur's brain networks: Continuous resting state fMRI over 30 days.

Objective: The aim of the current study was to identify typical alterations in resting state connectivity within different stages of the migraine cycle and to thus explore task-free mechanisms of headache attack generation in migraineurs.

Background: Recent evidence in migraine pathophysiology suggests that hours and even days before headache certain changes in brain activity take place, ultimately leading to an attack. Here, we investigate changes before headache onset using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Mesolimbic white matter connectivity mediates the preference for sweet food.

Dopaminergic brain structures like the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are thought to encode the incentive salience of palatable foods motivating appetitive behaviour. Animal studies have identified neural networks mediating the regulation of hedonic feeding that comprise connections of the NAc with the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the lateral hypothalamus (LH). Here, we investigated how structural connectivity of these pathways relates to individual variability in decisions on sweet food consumption in humans.

Working memory performance in the elderly relates to theta-alpha oscillations and is predicted by parahippocampal and striatal integrity.

The ability to maintain information for a short period of time (i.e. working memory, WM) tends to decrease across the life span with large inter-individual variability; the underlying neuronal bases, however, remain unclear.

Sleep Deprivation Selectively Upregulates an Amygdala-Hypothalamic Circuit Involved in Food Reward.

Sleep loss is associated with increased obesity risk, as demonstrated by correlations between sleep duration and change in body mass index or body fat percentage. Whereas previous studies linked this weight gain to disturbed endocrine parameters after sleep deprivation or restriction, neuroimaging studies revealed upregulated neural processing of food rewards after sleep loss in reward-processing areas such as the anterior cingulate cortex, ventral striatum, and insula. To address this ongoing debate between hormonal versus hedonic factors underlying sleep-loss-associated weight gain, we rigorously tested the association between sleep deprivation and food cue processing using high-resolution fMRI and assessment of hormones.

Nocebo-induced modulation of cerebral itch processing - An fMRI study.

It has been shown repeatedly that perceiving itch-related pictures or listening to a lecture on itch can enhance itch sensation and scratching behaviour (Niemeier and Gieler, 2000; Holle et al., 2012; Lloyd et al., 2013), indicating that itch is strongly influenced by expectations.

Don't fear 'fear conditioning': Methodological considerations for the design and analysis of studies on human fear acquisition, extinction, and return of fear.

The so-called 'replicability crisis' has sparked methodological discussions in many areas of science in general, and in psychology in particular. This has led to recent endeavours to promote the transparency, rigour, and ultimately, replicability of research. Originating from this zeitgeist, the challenge to discuss critical issues on terminology, design, methods, and analysis considerations in fear conditioning research is taken up by this work, which involved representatives from fourteen of the major human fear conditioning laboratories in Europe.

Affordance processing in segregated parieto-frontal dorsal stream sub-pathways.

The concept of affordances indicates "action possibilities" as characterized by object properties the environment provides to interacting organisms. Affordances relate to both perception and action and refer to sensory-motor processes emerging from goal-directed object interaction. In contrast to stable properties, affordances may vary with environmental context.

Dopaminergic receptor blockade changes a functional connectivity network centred on the amygdala.

Resting-state connectivity has become an increasingly important measure in characterizing the functional integrity of brain circuits in neuro-psychiatric conditions. One approach that has recently gained prominence in this regard-and which we use in this study-is to investigate how resting-state connectivity depends on the integrity of certain neuromodulator systems. Here, we use a pharmacological challenge in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the impact of dopaminergic receptor blockade on whole brain functional connectivity in twenty healthy human subjects.

REM Sleep Is Causal to Successful Consolidation of Dangerous and Safety Stimuli and Reduces Return of Fear after Extinction.

Unlabelled: Sleep has a profound impact on memory consolidation. In this study, human participants underwent Pavlovian conditioning and extinction before we manipulated nocturnal memory consolidation by a split-night protocol with 80 healthy male participants in four groups. Recall after a second (recovery) night of sleep revealed that sleeping the first half of the night, which is dominated by slow-wave sleep, did not improve recall.

Dissociating the neural mechanisms of pain consistency and pain intensity in the trigemino-nociceptive system.

Background: Individual differences in pain perception to a standardized nociceptive input are a well-known phenomenon within pain research. Brain structures known to play a crucial role in pain modulatory processes are the rostral/subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sACC) as well as the periaqueductal gray (PAG), which belong to the endogenous antinociceptive system. However, the exact mechanisms possibly leading to this high level of variance in pain perception are still a matter of debate.

Are abstract action words embodied? An fMRI investigation at the interface between language and motor cognition.

The cognitive and neural representation of abstract words is still an open question for theories of embodied cognition. Generally, it is proposed that abstract words are grounded in the activation of sensorimotor or at least experiential properties, exactly as concrete words. Further behavioral theories propose multiple representations evoked by abstract and concrete words.

Sleep deprivation is associated with attenuated parametric valuation and control signals in the midbrain during value-based decision making.

Sleep deprivation (SD) has detrimental effects on cognition, but the affected psychological processes and underlying neural mechanisms are still essentially unclear. Here we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging and computational modeling to examine how SD alters neural representation of specific choice variables (subjective value and decision conflict) during reward-related decision making. Twenty-two human subjects underwent two functional neuroimaging sessions in counterbalanced order, once during rested wakefulness and once after 24 h of SD.

Multisensory interactions between auditory and haptic object recognition.

Object manipulation produces characteristic sounds and causes specific haptic sensations that facilitate the recognition of the manipulated object. To identify the neural correlates of audio-haptic binding of object features, healthy volunteers underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while they matched a target object to a sample object within and across audition and touch. By introducing a delay between the presentation of sample and target stimuli, it was possible to dissociate haptic-to-auditory and auditory-to-haptic matching.

Lower ventral striatal activation during reward anticipation in adolescent smokers.

Objective: Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to addiction, and in the case of smoking, this often leads to long-lasting nicotine dependence. The authors investigated a possible neural mechanism underlying this vulnerability.

Method: Functional MRI was performed during reward anticipation in 43 adolescent smokers and 43 subjects matched on age, gender, and IQ.

The left fusiform gyrus hosts trisensory representations of manipulable objects.

During object manipulation the brain integrates the visual, auditory, and haptic experience of an object into a unified percept. Previous brain imaging studies have implicated for instance the dorsal part of the lateral occipital complex in visuo-tactile and the posterior superior temporal sulcus in audio-visual integration of object-related inputs (Amedi et al., 2005).

Grasping language--a short story on embodiment.

The new concept of embodied cognition theories has been enthusiastically studied by the cognitive sciences, by as well as such disparate disciplines as philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, and robotics. Embodiment theory provides the framework for ongoing discussions on the linkage between "low" cognitive processes as perception and "high" cognition as language processing and comprehension, respectively. This review gives an overview along the lines of argumentation in the ongoing debate on the embodiment of language and employs an ALE meta-analysis to illustrate and weigh previous findings.

Got it! Understanding the concept of a tool.

Understanding the function of a tool is an essential step in learning to use a tool. This aspect of interaction with tools has hitherto been neglected. Unlike acquiring the expertise in handling a new tool, which involves practice, understanding its function usually only requires a single observation of the tool being used.

Traumatic brain injury affects the frontomedian cortex--an event-related fMRI study on evaluative judgments.

Traumatic brain injuries represent the leading cause of death and disability in young adults in industrialized countries. Recently, it has been suggested that dysfunctions of the frontomedian cortex, which enables social cognition, are responsible for clinical deficits in the long-term. To validate this hypothesis, we examined brain activation in seven young adults suffering from diffuse axonal injury during a cognitive task that specifically depends on frontomedian structures, namely evaluative judgments, contrasted with semantic memory retrieval.

Dissociating networks of imitation.

The investigation of imitation, which consists of observation and later reproduction of voluntary actions, promises insights into the complex processes of human actions. Although several aspects concerning the component neural processes necessary for action execution are known, our current understanding of the neural networks underlying these remains sparse. The present study applies independent component analysis (ICA) to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired during imitation of abstract gestures and object-related actions.

Auditory working memory load impairs visual ventral stream processing: toward a unified model of attentional load.

Attentional interference between tasks performed in parallel is known to have strong and often undesired effects. As yet, however, the mechanisms by which interference operates remain elusive. A better knowledge of these processes may facilitate our understanding of the effects of attention on human performance and the debilitating consequences that disruptions to attention can have.

Neural dynamics of learning sound-action associations.

A motor component is pre-requisite to any communicative act as one must inherently move to communicate. To learn to make a communicative act, the brain must be able to dynamically associate arbitrary percepts to the neural substrate underlying the pre-requisite motor activity. We aimed to investigate whether brain regions involved in complex gestures (ventral pre-motor cortex, Brodmann Area 44) were involved in mediating association between novel abstract auditory stimuli and novel gestural movements.

Variability of the BOLD response over time: an examination of within-session differences.

Model-based analysis methods for fMRI data assume a priori knowledge of the time course of the hemodynamic response (HR) in reaction to experimental stimuli or events. This knowledge is incorporated into the hemodynamic response function (HRF), which is a common model of the HR. Although it is already known that the HR varies across individuals and brain regions, few studies have investigated how variations within one session affect the results of statistical analysis using the general linear model (GLM).